Sources of the PM10 aerosol in Flanders, Belgium, and re-assessment of the contribution from wood burning

Published Date
15 August 2016, Vol.562:550–560, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.04.074

Title 
Sources of the PM10 aerosol in Flanders, Belgium, and re-assessment of the contribution from wood burning

Author 

Willy Maenhaut ^a,b,,

Reinhilde Vermeylen ^b

Magda Claeys ^b

Jordy Vercauteren ^c

Edward Roekens ^c

• aGhent University (UGent), Department of Analytical Chemistry, Krijgslaan 281, S12, B-9000 Gent, Belgium
• bUniversity of Antwerp (UA), Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610, Antwerpen, Belgium
• cFlemish Environment Agency (VMM), Kronenburgstraat 45, B-2000, Antwerpen, Belgium

Received 18 February 2016. Revised 5 April 2016. Accepted 11 April 2016. Available online 22 April 2016. Editor: D. Barcelo

Highlights

• •
  A one-year study with 4 urban background sites and a total of 372 daily PM10 samples
• •
  First application of Positive Matrix Factorisation on aerosol data sets from Belgium
• •
  Comparison of two approaches for estimating the contribution from wood burning
• •
  Wood burning appears to be a notable source of As, Cd, and Pb
• •
  The impact from wood burning in Flanders is larger than previously thought

Abstract

From 30 June 2011 to 2 July 2012 PM10 aerosol samples were simultaneously taken every 4th day at four urban background sites in Flanders, Belgium. The sites were in Antwerpen, Gent, Brugge, and Oostende. The PM10 mass concentration was determined by weighing; organic and elemental carbon (OC and EC) were measured by thermal-optical analysis, the wood burning tracers levoglucosan, mannosan and galactosan were determined by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, 8 water-soluble ions were measured by ion chromatography, and 15 elements were determined by a combination of inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry and mass spectrometry. The multi-species dataset was subjected to receptor modeling by PMF. The 10 retained factors (with their overall average percentage contributions to the experimental PM10 mass) were wood burning (9.5%), secondary nitrate (24%), secondary sulfate (12.6%), sea salt (10.0%), aged sea salt (19.2%), crustal matter (9.7%), non-ferrous metals (1.81%), traffic (10.3%), non-exhaust traffic (0.52%), and heavy oil burning (3.0%). The average contributions of wood smoke for the four sites were quite substantial in winter and ranged from 12.5 to 20% for the PM10 mass and from 47 to 64% for PM10 OC. Wood burning appeared to be also a notable source of As, Cd, and Pb. The contribution from wood burning to the PM10 mass and OC was also assessed by making use of levoglucosan as single marker compound and the conversion factors of Schmidl et al. (2008), as done in our previous study on wood burning in Flanders (Maenhaut et al., 2012). However, the apportionments were much lower than those deduced from PMF. It seems that the conversion factors of Schmidl et al. (2008) may not be applicable to wood burning in Flanders. From scatter plots of the PMF-derived wood smoke OC and PM versus levoglucosan, we arrived at conversion factors of 9.7 and 22.6, respectively.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

• PM10 mass
• Organic carbon
• Source apportionment
• PMF
• Wood burning
• Levoglucosan

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• ⁎ 
  Corresponding author at: Ghent University (UGent), Department of Analytical Chemistry, Krijgslaan 281, S12, B-9000 Gent, Belgium.
  
  

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