Intercomparison of methods to estimate black carbon emissions from cookstoves

Abstract

Black carbon is the second largest contributor to climate change and also poses risks to human health. Despite the need for black carbon (BC) emissions estimates from residential biomass burning for cooking, quantitative data are still scarce. This scarcity is mainly due to the scattered location of the stoves, as well as relatively costly and complex analytical methods available. Two low cost and easy-to-use optical methods, a cell-phone based system and smoke stain reflectometry, where compared to elemental carbon (EC) concentrations by the Sunset OCEC Analyzer (TOT). The three techniques were challenged with different aerosol types (urban and biomass cookstoves), and different filter substrates (quartz and glass fibre). A good agreement was observed between the two low cost techniques and the reference system for the aerosol types and concentrations assessed, although the relationship was statistically different for each type of aerosol. The quantification of correction factors with respect to the reference method for the specific conditions under study is essential with either of the low-cost techniques. BC measurements from the cell-phone system and the reflectometer were moderately affected by the filter substrate. The easy use of the cell-phone based system may allow engaging cookstove users in the data collection process, increasing the amount and frequency of data collection which may, otherwise, not be feasible in resourced constrained locations. This would help to raise public awareness about environmental and health issues related to cookstoves.

A holistic review of off-site construction literature published between 2008 and 2018

“…Keywords such as modular construction used in some articles could be semantically different in other fields, for example, computer programming (Parreira Júnior and Penteado, 2018), chemistry (Fan et al, 2017), and biomedical material science (Medishetty et al, 2017). Even the keyword prefabricated construction could be ambiguous, as it might be in the context of a different field (de la Sota et al, 2017). Other articles (Zhao et al, 2018), which focused on product manufacturing without referring to the context of building construction or architectural design, were also removed from the literature sample.…”

Into the smoke : a research on household air pollution and climate impacts of biomass cookstoves in Senegal

“…However, despite the ongoing efforts to increase capacity for testing BC and other SLCPs, most biomass stoves technology worldwide have not been tested or proved to reduce BC yet (Jetter, 2015). The complexity of studying aerosol emissions from cooking is related to the wide distribution and remote location of the sources (Johnson et al, 2008b), the complicated effect of OC (Feng et al, 2013), the relatively complex BC and OC measurement methods (de la Sota et al, 2017;Ramanathan et al, 2011b), and because EC/BC and OC emissions range widely between different cooking technologies and biofuels (Grieshop et al, 2011;Guofeng et al, 2012;MacCarty et al, 2008b;Venkataraman et al, 2005) As a consequence, further studies should be conducted to provide concrete scientific data allowing estimation of the net climate effect of different improved and clean cooking solutions in different regions worldwide.…”

“…As previously explained, IAP meter units were co-located with DustTrak monitors. The aim of this comparison was to assess the performance of this lower cost instrument (de la Sota et al, 2017). It is relevant to present the correlation between these two methods because although the IAP meter has been used in a number of studies (Gorritty et al, 2011;Grabow et al, 2013;Sota et al, 2014), there are no publications covering field assessments of its performance compared to other commercial lightscattering measuring instruments.…”

“…Although both IAP meters belong to the 5000 series, previous studies showed that using inexpensive off-the-shelf smoke detector technology may suffer from substantial intra-unit variability (Chowdhury et al, 2007). This result indicates the need of individual instrument calibrations, which is also necessary when using other more costly air pollution monitors (Chowdhury, 2012;de la Sota et al, 2017;Viana et al, 2015).…”

Vínculos entre acceso a energía, cambio climático y género en países en desarrollo : una aproximación a través de las cocinas mejoradas

“…En segundo lugar, es necesario contar con factores de emisión de BC y del resto de compuestos considerados tanto para la solución de cocinado del escenario base como para la seleccionada. La disponibilidad de estudios al respecto es limitada y la realización de los mismos es complicada debido al tipo de actividad, especialmente si los estudios se realizan en terreno (de la Sota et al, 2017;Maccarty, Ogle, Still, Bond, & Roden, 2008) 3.3.1.3. Las soluciones de cocinado en el panorama internacional de la lucha contra el cambio climático A lo largo de los puntos anteriores se ha desgranado el papel que puede jugar el acceso a tecnologías modernas para cocinar en la lucha contra el cambio climático.…”