Development of a Passive Air Sampler for Measuring PCBs in Air

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Project Period: 
2004
Project Investigator(s): 
K. Hornbuckle, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Iowa
Hans-Joachim Lehmler, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, University of Iowa
Abstract: 

Sampling PCBs in air using high volume air samples is expensive, time consuming, and difficult to implement over a region. This pilot project will build and deploy an inexpensive passive air sampling system for atmospheric PCBs. The major benefit to using passive air samplers is their cost and ease in deployment. The major disadvantage is the lack of quantitative results. Thus, the goal of this project is two fold. First, the concentration of PCBs will be compared using the passive sampler to the concentration of PCBs using high volume samplers side by side. The second goal of this project is to compare the congener distributions of PCBs in air as collected by the passive sampler and a high volume sampler. PCBs are a mixture of as many as 209 different compounds (congeners). The complexity of these mixtures is a result of either the original manufacturing process or of weathering of these compounds in the environment. Several metabolites can be formed from each congener in plants, animals and humans, thus increasing the number of potentially environmentally and biologically relevant PCB compounds that may be present in the environment. This study using the passive samplers will be a good way to examine differences in congener distributions cheaply and effectively.