Physicochemical studies of aerosols at Montreal Trudeau Airport: The importance of airborne nanoparticles containing metal contaminants.

TLDR: A systematic airport study to characterize real-time size and number density distribution, chemical composition and morphology of the aerosols using complementary cutting-edge and novel techniques, namely optical aerosol analyzers, triple quad ICP-MS/MS and high-resolution STEM imaging.

About: This article is published in Environmental Pollution.The article was published on 2019-03-01 and is currently open access. It has received 31 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Aerosol.

Figures

Fig. 3 and indicate an abundance of sub-micron particles. The airborne nanoparticles seem to be nonspherical. Some of them have a high resemblance to soot or “black carbon” particles. Soot particles are aggregates of aciniform morphology composed of individual spherules produced by combustion (Medalia and Rivin, 1982). These compact aggregates are typical to diesel engine emissions and can be expected in samplescollected close to ground support vehicles and highway traffic. Black carbon is also a known constituent of aircraft engine emissions (Keuken et al., 2015; Durdina et al., 2017)Crystal lattices that could be indicative of the presence of fourlayered graphene were also seen. A previous study showed that the degree of graphene lamellae ordering of soot particles inn aircraft engine particulate matter increases with the thrust level of the aircraft engine (Vander Wal et al., 2014). This can be attributed to an increased temperature at higher thrust levels, which results in the desorption of volatiles as well re-orientation of the carbon chains into more organized structures (Liati et al., 2014; VanderWalet al., 2007).

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The authors performed a systematic airport study to characterize real-time size and number density distribution, chemical composition and morphology of the aerosols ( ~10 nme10 mm ) using complementary cutting-edge and novel techniques, namely optical aerosol analyzers, triple quad ICP-MS/MS and high-resolution STEM imaging. The total number density of aerosols, predominantly composed of nanoparticles, reached a maximum of 2 × 10 cm and is higher than reported values from any other international airport. The authors also provide evidence for a wide range of metal in aerosols, and emerging metals in nanoparticles ( e. g., Zn and Ni ). The geometric mean, median and 99th and 1st percentile values of observed nanoparticle number densities at the apron were 1. 0 × 10, 9. 0 × 10, 1. 2 × 10 and 9. 3 × 10 cm, respectively. This airport is thus a hotspot for nanoparticles containing emerging contaminants. The HRTEM-EDS provided evidence for nano-sized particles produced in combustion engines. Implications of their results for air pollution and health are discussed.