Air quality at airports and their surroundings can suffer from the emission of incompletely combusted hydrocarbons and fuel vapors. The objective of this Master's Thesis was to determine, whether the usage of alternative jet fuels led to an improvement of air quality in the airport surroundings.
For this purpose, an aerosol flowtube was built to simulate the atmosphere and perform photo oxidization experiments. Volatile organic compounds were measured with a PTR-ToF-MS, organic aerosols with a Charon-PTR-ToF-MS, and ozone and nitrogen oxides were monitored as well.
It was found that the main detected headspace composition of alternative and conventional jet fuels did not differ much, as these were typical fragments of a series of hydrocarbons. During the photo-oxidation experiments, the addition of OH showed a lower increase in the concentration of secondary organic aerosols for the biofuel HEFA with respect to conventional jet fuel Ref2. On the contrary, the synthetical jet fuel FSJF showed a higher increase in concentration than Ref2.
The results demonstrate that the built aerosol flowtube is useful for atmospheric photo-oxidation experiments, while PTR-ToF-MS operated in $H_3O +$ mode is limited in detecting pure jet fuel, as the proton affinities for alkanes are too low. Still, from the results obtained during the photo-oxidation experiments, the conclusion can be drawn, that through OH chemistry less secondary organic aerosols are formed for the biofuel HEFA with respect to conventional fuel Ref2. Also, the observed increase of volume mixing ratios of ozone caused through OH chemistry is lower for the alternative fuels compared to the conventional fuel Ref2.