Development of an Autonomous Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor with Integrated Calibration and Quality Assurance Capability

 

Authors

Philip Louis Croteau — Aerodyne Research, Inc.
Wen Xu — Aerodyne Research, Inc.
Leah R Williams — Aerodyne Research Inc
Timothy B Onasch — Aerodyne Research, Inc.
Manjula Canagaratna — Aerodyne Research, Inc.
Sonya Collier — University of California
Qi Zhang — University of California, Davis
Douglas R Worsnop — Aerodyne Research, Inc.
John T Jayne — Aerodyne Research, Inc.

Category

Secondary organic aerosol

Description

Over the past seven years the Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM) has become an important tool for understanding atmospheric chemistry by providing long term measurements of ambient aerosol chemical composition. While the goal of the ACSM is an instrument that can run for extended periods of time without significant user intervention, it still requires calibration with expensive and complicated instrumentation as well as significant post processing to provide reliable data. In order to make the ACSM more suitable for deployment in long-term monitoring stations where calibrations are performed by site technicians and where it is necessary to supply accurate, quality assured data in near real time, we have evaluated several different approaches to simple, relatively inexpensive calibration techniques for the ACSM and improved the software capabilities for real-time analysis of ACSM data. Here we present initial results from three different calibration schemes for the ACSM, one based on electrospray atomization, one based on ultrasonic nebulization, and one using only compressed gases. We also present improvements which have been implemented in the ACSM analysis software to provide more reliable real-time output.

Supporting URL

http://www.aerodyne.com