Project H104B
 Formaldehyde and VOC Tracer Relationships by PTR-MS

Project Period:05/01/2008 - 08/31/2009
Total Budget:$117,000
Sub-Contractors:Washington State University

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Executive Summary
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Final Report
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Supplemental Data
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The project's objective is to measure the temporal variability of HCHO, selected VOCs, and CO at Moody Tower for 1 month to determine the relative importance of primary and secondary sources of HCHO.   The field experiment will be conducted with other proposed field activities (i.e. SHARP and FLAIR projects) in April 2009.  The principal investigator is Tom Jobson.

A high sensitivity PTR-MS instrument (Ionicon Analytik) will be used to measure HCHO and a selected suite of VOCs (~ 25 species) to define tracer relationships between HCHO and primary or secondary VOC species.  A high sensitivity CO monitor (AeroLaser) will also be deployed to determine VOC / CO ratios with good time resolution and precision.   Sources of HCHO include primary sources such as direct emission from vehicles, potential emissions form flaring at petrochemical facilities, and secondary sources from the photochemical oxidation of numerous volatile organic compounds (VOC) species such as ethene and propene.  A range of VOCs will be measured that act as tracers of these sources.  

The hypothesis to be investigated is that the correlation between HCHO and other VOCs and CO is a useful indicator of primary and secondary origins of HCHO and will help to identify the impact of the Houston Ship Channel (HSC) as a primary HCHO source.  Direct emissions of HCHO from flares or from rapid photochemical oxidation of reactive alkenes emitted in HSC will be evident in the VOC tracer relationships. The high time resolution measurements of VOCs by the PTR-MS method will allow the identification of plume impacts and provide a statistically robust data set to determine meteorological influences such as wind direction on primary and secondary VOC mixing ratios.  The PTR-MS and CO data set will analyzed using multivariate statistical methods, such as principal component analysis (PCA), to identify the factors that contribute to HCHO variability.

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