SOA Formation from Photooxidation of Individual PAHs and Mixtures

Abstract:

Individual SOA experiments on PAHs such as naphthalene and methylnaphthalenes were conducted at the UCR CE-CERT environmental chamber. Measurements were made with a suite of instrumentation that includes HR-ToF-AMS, VTDMA, and APM-SMPS to comprehensively understand the chemical composition characteristics, volatility and density of particles. Our results indicated that the SOA yield from PAHs is large and the elemental and chemical composition analysis of HR-ToF-AMS revealed that oxygen-to-carbon ratio (O/C) increases with oxidation time and also suggested that the SOA from these three PAHs are mostly low volatility OOA. The density of aerosol formed from 1-methylnaphthalene photooxidation under high NOx condition was observed to decrease from 1.5 g/cm³ to 0.7 g/cm³ during the course of experiment. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of 1-methylnaphthalene SOA showed that the SOA coagulated after 5~6 hours photooxidation to form fractal-like particles. The sensitivity of SOA formation to varying HC mixtures is further explored. Serial mixtures of PAHs photooxidation experiments were conducted, including naphthalene, 1-methylnapthalene, 2-methylnaphtalene with m-xylene, and/or the surrogate mixture used to develop the Carter O₃ reactivity scales. Preliminary results show that the SOA formation from m-xylene and naphthalene mixture photooxidation was found to be suppressed by m-xylene, and the volatility measured as volume remaining fraction (VRF) of the m-xylene and naphthalene mixture increases from 0.2 to 0.4, which indicates the volatility of mixture SOA is dominated by m-xylene SOA.