Methodological advances to improve repeatability of SOA generation in environmental chambers

Abstract

Most laboratory atmospheric chamber studies probing the chemical and physical properties of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) perform such experiments with mixing ratios of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) above atmospheric relevance (≳50 ppb_v). When performing ozonolysis of biogenic VOCs at mixing ratios of atmospheric relevance (≲10 ppb_v), a major hinderance on the repeatability of replicate experiments is due to the limitations of conventional VOC injection techniques. To overcome these limitations, two novel components (stop/flow and split valves) were embedded in a conventional VOC injection setup, thereby permitting the use of higher VOC volumes of injection to attain low VOC mixing ratios, and the delivery of the VOC to the environmental chamber as a short, discrete pulse for subsequent reaction. Implementation of these novel VOC injection components has resulted in improvements in variability between replicate chamber experiments of up to a factor of 7 with respect to particle number, mass, and size distributions at both high and low VOC mixing ratios (50 and 10 ppb_v, respectively). These improvements permit extension of quantitative measurements of SOA formation to VOC mixing ratios at or near atmospheric levels, where new particle formation (NPF) and SOA mass loading are typically within experimental variability.

Copyright © 2023 American Association for Aerosol Research

EDITOR:

• Jonathan P. Reid

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CHE 1709751.