UC Riverside

Airborne particles are one of the most important and certainly the most visible aspects of air pollution. The effects span the areas of human health, visibility degradation, radiation and photochemistry and climate changes. Aerosols are small particles that suspended in the atmosphere which can be in the solid or liquid phase. Cooking is an element source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and a potential source of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) both indoors and outdoors. In this study, SOA emissions from oxidation reactions between canola oil, peanut oil and corn oil with O3 and OH radicals were characterized using a flow tube reactor and a potential aerosol mass(PAM) chamber.

SOA formed from emissions of atomizing cooking oils through reactions with excess ozone and OH radicals in a flow tube reactor or PAM chamber as well as primary organic aerosol (POA) emissions were characterized using a scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS), a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-TOF-AMS) and an Aerosol Particle Mass Analyzer(APM).

The results show evidence for secondary organic aerosols(SOA) formation and explain the observed mass and composition changes, as well as the surface reaction, occurred during the oxidation reactions.