UC Davis

Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) has been used to predict elemental carbon (EC) on polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) filter samples from the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Chemical Speciation Network (CSN). This study provides a proof-of-principle demonstration of using multilevel modeling to determine thermal/optical reflectance (TOR) equivalent EC (a.k.a., FT-IR EC) on PTFE samples collected in the CSN. Initially, spectra from nine geographically disperse sites were pooled and calibrated directly to collocated TOR EC measurements. The FT-IR EC quantified in test samples was deemed substandard when judged against an earlier study, e.g., R2 = 0.760 and median absolute deviation (MAD) = 26.7%. Upon scrutinizing each sample's absolute prediction error and squared Mahalanobis distance, Elizabeth, NJ predictions were found to exhibit atypical systematic errors, motivating the development of a multilevel classification and calibration procedure. Atypical Elizabeth spectra were distinguished from the (typical) CSN spectra by training a partial least-square discriminant analysis. Predicting EC using calibrations dedicated to either atypical or typical samples produced a satisfactory improvement in overall performance (R2 = 0.886, MAD = 19.8%). Analysis of the atypical FT-IR spectra and select TOR thermal fractions suggested that Elizabeth samples contained elevated levels of diesel particulate matter as evidenced by the use of organic nitrogen functional groups for prediction, very low average OC/EC, and minimal charring during TOR speciation. FT-IR EC from the other eight sites was predominately determined by aliphatic C-H, C = C aromatic, and functional groups associated with oxidation. This study provides preliminary confirmation that FT-IR EC may be accurately determined from source-oriented calibrations under a combined classification and calibration methodology. Copyright © 2018 American Association for Aerosol Research.