It has long been known that cooking can create high concentrations of aerosol indoors. Increasingly, it is now being reported that cooking aerosol is also a significant component of outdoor particulate matter. As yet, the health consequences are unquantified, but the presence of well known chemical carcinogens is a clear indication that cooking aerosol cannot be benign. This review is concerned with current knowledge of the mass concentrations, size distribution and chemical composition of aerosol generated from typical styles of cooking as reported in the literature. It is found that cooking can generate both appreciable masses of aerosol at least within the area where the cooking takes place, that particle sizes are largely within the respirable size range and that major groups of chemical compounds which have been used to characterise cooking aerosol include alkanes, fatty acids, dicarboxyclic acids, lactones, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, alkanones and sterols. Measured data, cooking emission profiles and source apportionment methods are briefly reviewed.
The particle number size distribution (PNSD) of airborne particles not only provides us with information about sources and atmospheric processing of particles, but also plays an important role in determining regional lung dose. As a result, urban particles and their size distributions have received much attention with a rapid increase of publications in recent years. The object of this review is to synthesise and analyse existing knowledge on particles in urban environments with a focus on their number concentration and size distribution. This study briefly reviews the characterization of PNSD from seven major sources of urban particles including traffic emissions, industrial emissions, biomass burning, cooking, transported aerosol, marine aerosol and nucleation. It then discusses atmospheric physical processes such as coagulation or condensation which have a strong influence on PNSD. Finally, the implications of PNSD datasets for source modelling are briefly discussed. Based on this review, it is concluded that the concentrations, modal structures and temporal patterns of urban particles are strongly influenced by traffic emissions, which are identified as the main source of particle number in urban environments. Information derived from particle number size distributions is beginning to play an important role in source apportionment studies.
The physical properties of indoor particles were measured with an Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS) system (14.6–850 nm), an Aerodynamic Particle Sizer (APS, 0.54–18 μm) and an Hygroscopic Tandem Differential Mobility Analyzer (H-TDMA) in an apartment located in an urban background site in Prague (Czech Republic) from 15 August to 8 September, 2014. The total particle maximum number concentration was 9.38 × 104, 1.46 × 105, 2.89 × 104, 2.25 × 105 and 1.57 × 106 particles cm−3 for particles released from vacuum cleaning, soap/W5 cleaning spray, smoking, incense burning and cooking (frying) activities, respectively. Particles emitted from cleaning activities showed unimodal number size distributions, with the majority of particles (>98.2 %) in the ultrafine size range (Dp <100 nm) and modes at a diameter of 19.8 nm for vacuum cleaning and 30.6 nm for soap/W5 cleaning. Smoking and incense burning predominantly generated particles in the accumulation mode with a count median diameter around 90–150 nm while cooking emissions showed a bimodal structure with a main mode at 47.8 nm. Particles from vacuum cleaning, incense burning, smoking and cooking emissions were found to be “nearly hydrophobic” with an average growth factor (Gf) around 1.01–1.10, while particles emitted from desk cleaning using organic compounds were found to be “less-hygroscopic” (Gf ∼1.12–1.16). Based on an adjusted MPPD model with a consideration of the hygroscopic properties of particles, the total lung deposition fractions of these particles by number when they penetrate into the human lung were 0.73 ± 0.02, 0.62 ± 0.03, 0.37 ± 0.03, 0.32 ± 0.03 and 0.49 ± 0.02 for vacuum cleaning, desk cleaning, smoking, incense burning and cooking, respectively.
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