Sources and Health Risk of Organic Compounds in Respirable Particles in Tehran, Iran

Investigating the concentration levels, distribution patterns, source identification and health risk assessment of PAHs, n-alkanes, hopanes, and steranes in deposited dust of Mashhad, Iran

“…The CPI is de ned as the ratio of the total concentration of odd carbon number homologues in the sample to the total concentration of even carbon number homologues (Andreou et al 2008, Duan et al 2010, Zhang et al 2017. CPI values are used to compare the contribution of vehicular and human activities to biological sources (Moeinaddini et al 2014a, Ravindra et al 2008, with values close to unity indicating vehicle emissions and other human activities, and values >3 indicating a predominant origin from biological materials. The WNA% value (WNA = C n -[(C n+1 + C n−1 )/2] where n is the odd carbon congener, WNA% = (∑WNA/∑n-alkanes)*100) is calculated for odd carbon number homologues, and it is used to indicate biogenic as opposed to petrogenic sources (Javed et al 2019, Omar et al 2007, Zhang et al 2017.…”

“…The U:R was applied to determine the pollution level caused by the residues of petroleum, and it can also be used to differentiate between the sources; i.e. biomass and fossil fuel combustion (Moeinaddini et al 2014a, Mostafa et al 2009, Rogge et al 1993a, Shirneshan et al 2017.…”

“…To characterize petroleum inputs, several geochemical ratios derived from hopane biomarkers were used (Shirneshan et al 2017) Besides that, factor analysis (FA) was applied to nd the PAHs' and n-alkanes' sources (SPSS version 20.0 for Windows, SPSS Inc.). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett's tests were also used to assess the suitability of the dataset concerning the FA; for KMO values of more than 0.6, the data was considered suitable (Moeinaddini et al 2014a, Ravindra et al 2008. The FA of PAHs and n-alkanes were conducted separately based on the KMO test results.…”

“…2014). BaP emissions can be speci cally related with biomass combustion (Lin et al 2010, Park et al 2002, napthalene emissions with petroleum application due to its direct relevance with incomplete combustion sources (Jiang et al 2014, Moeinaddini et al 2014a) and Chr emissions with natural gas combustion (Harrison et al 1996).…”

“…Hence, there was a broad application of molecular DRs to qualitatively de ne the sources of air pollutants (Azimi et al 2018, Bahry et al 2009, Omar et al 2007). However, these ratios should be used with caution due to the variations in pollution sources and the decomposition of most of the organic-based contaminants within the atmosphere due to their reactions with the oxidants present in the atmosphere (Moeinaddini et al 2014a, Zakaria et al 2000.…”