Superfund Research Program

Combustion/Thermal Reactor Core (ARRA Funded)

Project Leader: Slawomir Lomnicki
Grant Number: P42ES013648
Funding Period: 2009-2011

Project-Specific Links

Final Progress Reports

Year:   2010 

The Combustion Core provides the biomedical and non-biomedical projects with laboratory-generated surrogates of fine and ultrafine particle-pollutant systems. A thermal reactor is being used to generate size-selected/controlled surrogates of combustion-generated particles consisting of particles of silica doped with metal nanoclusters and organic pollutants. A high-temperature flow reactor is used to generate entrained metal nanoparticles as well as soot-coated nanoparticles. The Combustion Core provides baseline analysis and characterization of the morphology, size, organic content, and elemental composition. The combustion core generates and characterizes samples for the biomedical projects.

Progress for this year includes the development of techniques for generation of size-controlled metal oxide nanoclusters on silica and supported metal monolayers on fine particulate matter, preparation of particulate matter samples with environmentally persistent free radicals from various precursors, flow reactor generation of soot with controlled composition and analytical characterization of the pollutant-particle systems. The researchers have developed simple but effective methods of dosing known quantities of CHCs, and HCs onto their particles and controlling the nature of their association with the particles by varying the reaction conditions. The researchers can produce a pollutant-particle system in which the pollutant is an adsorbed molecular species by dosing at the appropriate low temperature or a chemisorbed EPFR by dosing at higher temperatures.