The organic composition of diesel particulate matter, diesel fuel and engine oil of a non-road diesel generator

Abstract

Diesel-powered equipment is known to emit significant quantities of fine particulate matter to the atmosphere. Numerous organic compounds can be adsorbed onto the surfaces of these inhalable particles, among which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are considered potential occupational carcinogens. Guidelines have been established by various agencies regarding diesel emissions and various control technologies are under development. The purpose of this study is to identify, quantify and compare the organic compounds in diesel particulate matter (DPM) with the diesel fuel and engine oil used in a non-road diesel generator. Approximately 90 organic compounds were quantified (with molecular weight ranging from 120 to 350), which include alkanes, PAHs, alkylated PAHs, alkylbenzenes and alkanoic acids. The low sulfur diesel fuel contains 61% alkanes and 7.1% of PAHs. The identifiable portion of the engine oil contains mainly the alkanoic and benzoic acids. The composition of DPM suggests that they may be originated from unburned diesel fuel, engine oil evaporation and combustion generated products. Compared with diesel fuel, DPM contains fewer fractions of alkanes and more PAH compounds, with the shift toward higher molecular weight ones. The enrichment of compounds with higher molecular weight in DPM may be combustion related (pyrogenic).

Measurement of PM and its chemical composition in real-world emissions from non-road and on-road diesel vehicles

“…Liang et al (2005) characterized diesel PM emitted from non-road engines using a dynamometer test and found that n-alkanes accounted for 0.83 % of PM, which is lower than the proportion found in this study. This result could be attributed to the lowsulfur diesel fuel and the different sampling methods they used.…”

“…Fuel quality has a significant effect on PM emissions from vehicles (Cui et al, 2016;Liang et al, 2005;Zhang and Balasubramanian, 2014). Because various fuels are used in excavators and always have poor qualities, all of the corresponding fuels from each of the tested excavators were collected for quality analysis.…”

Tracking human footprints in Antarctica through passive sampling of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in inland lakes

“…3), which was predominated by C 1 -naphthanes and C 2 -naphthanes (Bernabei et al, 2003;Saeed and Al-Mutairi, 2004). Although diesel fuel has been commonly used in Antarctica, the composition profiles of PAHs in the lakes were slightly different from the known profiles of diesel fuel, which were evidenced by the predominance of C 2 -naphthanes and C 3 -naphthanes (Dobbins et al, 2006;Liang et al, 2005). This finding suggested that diesel fuel may be partly responsible for PAHs loading to the lakes.…”

“…(Fig. 1), several jet fuel and diesel fuel samples acquired from the literature (Bernabei et al, 2003;Christie et al, 2012;Dobbins et al, 2006;Liang et al, 2005;Rhead and Hardy, 2003;Shumway, 2000), exhaust particulate matter (PM) from combustion of jet fuel (Christie et al, 2012), gas phase emitted from motor vehicle traffic in a Log Angel roadway tunnel (Fraser et al, 1998), water-soluble fraction of aviation fuel (Saeed and Al-Mutairi, 2004), and seawater as obtained by semipermeable membrane device (SPMD) around an oil platform off the Norwegian coast (Harman et al, 2009). …”

Control of Diesel Gaseous and Particulate Emissions with a Tube-Type Wet Electrostatic Precipitator

“…The detailed procedures of DPM extraction and instrumental analysis have been published elsewhere. 33 The extracted solution was concentrated by nitrogen purging to approximately 1 mL for GC/MS analysis.…”