An Investigation into the Effect of Emissions from Industrial Complexes on Air Quality in the Ulsan Metropolitan City Utilizing Trace Components in PM2.5

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of industrial complexes on the air quality in the Ulsan Metropolitan City, Korea, by analyzing the concentration of trace substances. Importantly, this study performs segmentation and analysis of the components of particulate matter for tracking emission sources. Concentrations of particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters ≤10 and ≤2.5 µm (PM10 and PM2.5, respectively) and 19 substances comprising PM2.5 (such as ions, carbon, and nine elements) were measured hourly during the year 2017 in the southeastern intensive air quality monitoring station of the National Institute of Environmental Research, Korea. This study identified and investigated the time periods during which the vanadium content in PM2.5 was higher than the annual mean (1.026 ng/µg) through selection cases (SCs). The annual mean concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 were 18.50 and 32.35 µg/m3, respectively, and were higher (i.e., 26.54 and 45.84 µg/m3, respectively) in SCs. Notably, the concentrations were high even when the main wind direction of SCs was southeasterly, which was mainly the case in summer. Furthermore, the emission sources contributing to PM2.5 were estimated using the correlations of organic carbon, elemental carbon, zinc, iron, manganese, and titanium concentrations in the SCs. This study demonstrated that a detailed tracking of the emission sources at a local scale is possible by analyzing the composition of the components of PM2.5.