A mass spectrometric study of secondary organic aerosols formed from the photooxidation of anthropogenic and biogenic precursors in a reaction chamber

M. Alfarra,D. Paulsen,M. Gysel,A. Garforth,J. Dommen,A. Prévôt,D. Worsnop,U. Baltensperger,H. Coe

Published 2006 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

ABSTRACT

An Aerodyne Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) has been utilised to provide on-line measurements of the mass spectral signatures and mass size distributions of the oxidation products resulting from irradiating 1,3,5- trimethylbenzene (1,3,5-TMB) and -pinene, separately, in the presence of nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide and propene in a reaction chamber. Mass spectral results indicate that both precursors produce SOA with broadly similar chemi- cal functionality of a highly oxidised nature. However, sig- nificant differences occur in the minor mass spectral frag- ments for the SOA in the two reaction systems, indicating that they have different molecular composition. Nitrogen- containing organic compounds have been observed in the photooxidation products of both precursors, and their for- mation appeared to be controlled by the temporal variabil- ity of NOx. Although the overall fragmentation patterns of the photooxidation products in both systems did not change substantially over the duration of each experiment, the con- tribution of some individual mass fragments to total mass appeared to be influenced by the irradiation time. The ef- fective densities of the 1,3,5-TMB and -pinene SOA parti- cles were determined for various particle sizes using the re- lationship between mobility and vacuum aerodynamic diam- eters. The effective density for the 1,3,5-TMB SOA ranged from 1.35-1.40g/cm 3 , while that for -pinene SOA ranged from 1.29-1.32g/cm 3 . The determined effective densities did not show dependence on irradiation time. Results sug- gest that further chemical processing of SOA takes place in the real atmosphere, as neither the -pinene nor the 1,3,5- TMB experimental results reproduce the right relative prod- uct distribution between carbonyl-containing and multifunc- tional carboxylic acid species measured at ambient locations influenced by aged continental organic aerosols.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-81 of 81 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 637 citing papers · Page 1 of 7