Publication Date:
2013-09-17
Description:
Modeling the influence of precursor volatility and molecular structure on secondary organic aerosol formation using evaporated fuel experiments Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, 13, 24405-24434, 2013 Author(s): S. H. Jathar, N. M. Donahue, P. J. Adams, and A. L. Robinson We use SOA production data from an ensemble of evaporated fuels to test various SOA formation models. Except for gasoline, traditional SOA models focusing exclusively on volatile species in the fuels under-predict the observed SOA formation. These models can be improved dramatically by accounting for lower volatility species, but at the cost of a large set of free parameters. In contrast, a SOA model based only on the volatility of the precursor, starting with the volatility distribution of the evaporated fuels and optimized for the volatility reduction of first-generation products, reasonably reproduces the observed SOA formation with relatively few free parameters. The exceptions are exotic fuels such as Fischer-Tropsch fuels that expose the central assumption of the volatility based model that most emissions consist of complex mixtures displaying reasonably average behavior. However, for the vast majority of fuels, the volatility based model performs well.
Print ISSN:
1680-7367
Electronic ISSN:
1680-7375
Topics:
Geosciences
