Engineering of PM10 and PM2.5 samplers
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abstract
Agricultural operations including cotton ginning are encountering difficulties with complying with air pollution regulations across the cotton belt. It is likely that these problems will continue and get more severe. EPA has interpreted that the concentration limit on the property line must be less than the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS). For PM10 and PM2.5, the 24-hour NAAQS are 150 g/m3 and 65 g/m3, respectively. The logical question by those who are being regulated is how accurate are the concentration measurements of PM10 and PM2.5? Both PM10 and PM2.5 samplers have pre-separators that remove the dust particles larger than the size to be sampled allowing the smaller particle to pass on to the filter. These pre-separators are not 100% efficient. In other words dust particles larger than 2.5 and 10 microns penetrate the pre-separator to the filter and dust particles less than 2.5 and 10 microns are captured by the preseparator. Hence, there is some error in the measurement of PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations when sampling with EPA approved samplers. The purpose of this paper is to quantify this potential measurement error with the goal of impacting the regulatory process. For example: if a measurement of 151 g/m3 were made at the property line of a cotton gin and the potential error for a PM10 sampler was 10%, an argument could be made that this measurement should not be a violation of the property line concentration limit since a 150 g/m3 concentration measured with an EPA approved sampler could be as high as 165 g/m3 and this 151 g/m3 could be as low as 136 g/m3.
