Seasonal Variation of Concentrations and Sources for n-alkanes in PM 10 Measured in Seoul

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Research article

Journal of the Korean Society for Environmental Analysis 2015;18(2):93-100.

서울 대기 중 미세먼지 내 n-alkanes의 계절별 농도 및 배출 특성

이세표¹, 임형배¹, 이지이¹, 김용표²

¹조선대학교
²이화여자대학교

Abstract

Ambient particulate n-alkanes were analyzed for PM10 samples collected in Seoul from April 2010 to April 2011. The average concentration of total n-alkanes from C20 to C34 was 53.68±35.02 ng/m3, ranging from 10.36 to 166.1 ng/m3. The concentration distributions of n-alkane compounds in this study exhibited peaks at C29 during the whole sampling period, which indicated that n-alkanes of biogenic origin such as plant wax predominated in the PM10 in Seoul. The average carbon preference index (CPI) value was 1.95±0.54 in the range of 0.82-6.02. The decrease of the CPI during the heating period indicated the contribution of fossil fuel combustion. Estimation of sources based on the WNA% calculation showed that 32.2±15.0% of the n-alkanes in PM10 in Seoul during the non-heating period originated from plant wax. The source estimation was performed using the principal component analysis method. Three major components were found to account for 38.2%, 33.4% and 19.0% of the total variance, which corresponded to plant wax, vehicular emissions and fossil fuels for heating, respectively.

Key Words: n-alkanes, PM10, Carbon preference index, The plant wax alkane (WaxCn), Principal component analysis