Quantitative Apportionment of Urban Aerosol Mass by Factor Analysis
Alpert, Daniel Jeremy
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/67792
Description
Title
Quantitative Apportionment of Urban Aerosol Mass by Factor Analysis
Author(s)
Alpert, Daniel Jeremy
Issue Date
1980
Department of Study
Nuclear Engineering
Discipline
Nuclear Engineering
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Environmental Sciences
Energy
Language
eng
Abstract
A receptor method for quantitatively resolving the sources of airborne particulate matter was developed. This procedure, called target transformation factor analysis (TTFA), requires no prior knowledge about the nature of the system under study. TTFA can determine the number of sources that are contributing to the system, determine the elemental composition of the particles emitted by each source, and estimate the amount of material that each source contributed to each sample.
TTFA was applied to a set of simulated aerosol samples to evaluate its utility for resolving the sources of airborne particles. An analysis of a small set of aerosol samples collected in Boston, MA, demonstrated the resolution of sources in real samples. Finally, TTFA was applied to a subset of the aerosol-composition data acquired during the Regional Air Pollution Study (RAPS) of St. Louis, MO. The RAPS program collected nearly 34,000 samples with ten, continuously operated, dichotomous samplers from March 1975 through March 1977. To determine the most appropriate way to apply TTFA to very large data sets, two separate subsets of the data were analyzed: (1) All the samples collected during July and August 1976 at a single sampling site, and (2) All the samples collected at the ten RAPS stations during a single week. Because of limitations in available computer space, the samples from one station were analyzed in two temporal groups corresponding to the months of July and August. The data from one week at all RAPS stations were also subdivided, with days Saturday, Sunday and Monday in one group and days Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in the other. In addition to temporarl divisions, the two subsets were divided into the two particle-size groups. The fine- and coarse-fraction samples in each group were analyzed separately. A more detailed source resolution was obtained from the analyses of the data divided into particle-size fractions. In addition, superior results were obtained when the variation of aerosol composition with time at a single location was examined. The examination of the spatial variation over multiple sites during a shorter time period was hindered by the apparent differences in the nature of the sources impacting each of the sampling stations.
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