Investigations of Secondary Organic Aerosol in the UCR EPA Environmental Chamber

Abstract

A large indoor environmental reactor was completed in 2002 at UC Riverside to investigate photochemical processes leading to ozone and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation. The chamber is briefly described by Carter (2004) in a separate contribution to this workshop and in a more detailed manuscript submitted to Atmospheric Environment (Carter et al., 2005). The contribution to the workshop covered some details of the UCR chamber wall characterization (Carter, 2004), selected approaches to studies of secondary organic aerosol formation (Cocker et al., 2001 and Song et al., 2005), the NO_x dependence of m-xylene SOA formation (Song et al, 2005), some acid catalyzed reaction work from Caltech (Gao et al., 2004), and select details of the Caltech environmental chamber (Cocker et al., 2001). This contribution will briefly describe the SOA components of the chamber facility and advantages of the new reactor with respect to SOA investigations, and will summarize the findings on the importance of hydrocarbon:NO_x ratio on SOA formation in the m-xylene photooxidation system