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Radiocarbon Source Apportionment in a Biofuels Era
Citation:
LEWIS, C. W. Radiocarbon Source Apportionment in a Biofuels Era. Presented at 2006 CRC Mobile Source Air Toxics Workshop, Phoenix, AZ, October 23 - 25, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
The goal of this task is to develop methods and models to reduce the uncertainty in quantifying local and regional air pollutant source impacts on ambient samples collected in speciated PM, air toxic, and semi-continuous measurement networks. A combination of high resolution sampling, organic and inorganic analytical methods, and models will be developed and evaluated to reduce the uncertainty in source apportionment:
(1) semi-continuous inorganic species sampling
(2) inorganic analysis
(3) organic analysis for medium flow samples
(4) multivariate receptor models for ambient samples
(5) regional and local models
In addition, this task contributes to two additional tasks that have research focused on reducing the uncertainty in source apportionment: Identify Sources of Human Exposure (21176), and NAAQS implementation (21179).
Description:
Biofuels (gasohol and biodiesel) introduce radiocarbon into the U.S. mobile source fuel supply where it was previously absent. Initial measurements of radiocarbon in the PM2.5 combustion emissions from engines using gasohol indicate that this may have less effect on radiocarbon source apportionment of PM2.5 than anticipated.