Study of humic-like substances in fog and interstitial aerosol by size-exclusion chromatography and capillary electrophoresis

Characterization of macromolecular organic matter in atmospheric dust from Guangzhou, China

“…Another pronounced feature of the HA was its low aromatic and oxygen-substituted aromatic carbon content, with an aromaticity of 23.43%. These features are similar to hulis from aerosols reported in the literature (Krivácsy et al, 2000;Sýkorová et al, 2009).…”

“…As yet, these isolation and characterization approaches have not been applied to dust, although hulis and BC in aerosol have been widely studied in the past (Havers et al, 1998;Krivácsy et al, 2000;Dinar et al, 2006;Taraniuk et al, 2007;Kirchstetter et al, 2008;Dutkiewicz et al, 2009;Sýkorová et al, 2009). In the present study, we isolated HAs, kerogen and black carbon (KB) and BC from dust collected in Guangzhou, China, and then characterized the chemical composition of the fractionated macromolecule organic matter using elementary analysis (EA), X-ray diffraction (XRD), organic petrographic examination (OPE), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), solid state 13 C cross-polarization and magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( 13 C-CP/MAS NMR) and Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR).…”

Black carbon or brown carbon? The nature of light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosols

“…The bulk characterization of organic carbon in fine continental aerosol, in particular of its water-soluble fraction, revealed that it contains substantial amounts of material with properties closely resembling those of natural humic/fulvic substances, such as their IR, UV, and visible spectra, NMR spectra, mass spectra, chemical composition, affinity to chromatographic resins, and solubility (Havers et al, 1998a;Zappoli et al, 1999;Gelencsér et al, 2000a;Gelencsér et al, 2000b;Krivácsy et al, 2000;Decesari et al, 2001;Kiss et al, 2001;Krivácsy et al, 2001). Natural humic/fulvic substances are known to result from the conversion of plant degradation products into polymeric substances with a high degree of aromaticity.…”

“…In other words, contrary to C soot , for which surrogates such as BC e or EC a exist that are widely used for its representation in atmospheric science, no such surrogate can be meaningfully defined for C brown . One might argue that natural humic or fulvic acids may be suitable for representing the fundamental properties of C brown , as has been proven in a series of studies on atmospheric aerosol (Havers et al, 1998a;Zappoli et al, 1999;Krivácsy et al, 2000;Kiss et al, 2001;Krivácsy et al, 2001;Graber and Rudich, 2006), and was suggested by Fuzzi et al (2001). However, terrestrial or aquatic humic and fulvic acids are not single chemical species, but operationally defined classes of compounds, which themselves exhibit an extremely wide range of physico-chemical properties.…”

Comparison of isolation and quantification methods to measure humic-like substances (HULIS) in atmospheric particles

“…Commonly used laboratory procedures for isolation and extraction of atmospheric HULIS include solid-phase extraction (SPE) Graber and Rudich, 2006), capillary electrophoresis (Krivácsy et al, 2000), ion exchange chromatography (Decesari et al, 2000), reversed-phase chromatography (Góra and Hutta, 2005), size-exclusion chromatography (Krivácsy et al, 2000;Samburova et al, 2005). Due to its easy operation and selective isolation, SPE is the most frequently-used method for simultaneous concentration and fractionation of HULIS from other dissolved constituents.…”