Characterization of a new smog chamber for evaluating SAPRC gas-phase chemical mechanism
Merched Azzi , Kangwei Li , Chao Lin , Chunmei Geng , Stephen White , Linghong Chen , Zhier Bao , Xin Zhang , Yanyun Zhao , Lixia Han , Wen Yang , Tao WANG , Jianmin CHEN , Abdelwahid Mellouki , Christian GEORGE , Yujing MU , Hong LI
DOI:10.1016/j.jes.2020.03.028
Received September 29, 2019,Revised , Accepted March 17, 2020, Available online May 07, 2020
Volume 32,2020,Pages 14-22
A new state-of-the-art indoor smog chamber facility (CAPS-ZJU) has been constructed and characterized at Zhejiang University, which is designed for chemical mechanism evaluation under well-controlled conditions. A series of characterization experiments were performed to validate the well-established experimental protocols, including temperature variation pattern, light spectrum and equivalent intensity (JNO2), injection and mixing performance, as well as gases and particle wall loss. In addition, based on some characterization experiments, the auxiliary wall mechanism has been setup and examined. Fifty chamber experiments were performed across a broad range of experimental scenarios, and we demonstrated the ability to utilize these chamber data for evaluating SAPRC chemical mechanism. It was found that the SAPRC-11 can well predict the O3 formation and NO oxidation for almost all propene runs, with 6 hr Δ(O3 – NO) model error of –3% ± 7%, while the final O3 was underestimated by ~20% for isoprene experiments. As for toluene and p-xylene experiments, it was confirmed that SAPRC-11 has significant improvement on aromatic chemistry than earlier version of SAPRC-07, although the aromatic decay rate was still underestimated to some extent. The model sensitivity test has been carried out, and the most sensitive parameters identified are the initial concentrations of reactants and the light intensity as well as HONO offgasing rate and O3 wall loss rate. All of which demonstrated that CAPS-ZJU smog chamber could derive high quality experimental data, and could provide insights on chamber studies and chemical mechanism development.
