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Research Progress

Researchers Realizes Sensitive Detection of a Type of Oxide Acid

Nov 02, 2017

Scientists at Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM), Hefei Institutes of Physical Science have made advances in developing new methods for measuring dinitrogen pentoxide N2O5 by cavity ring down spectroscopy (CRDS).

The results were published online in the Science of the Total Environment.

N2O5 plays an important role in nocturnal chemical processes as the reservoir specie of the nitrate radical. It is an intermediate in the conversion of NOx (NOx ≡ NO + NO2) to HNO3 when reacting with water in an efficient heterogeneous reaction.

Furthermore, the presence of N2O5 in the troposphere enables halogen activation and the production of inorganic nitrate by reaction with salt aerosols, forming ClNO2.

In the study, the results from CRDS were compared with the ones from Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectroscopy (CEAS) in winter in a suburban area in Beijing.

A total of 13 days of data were obtained and a good agreement between the two instruments was presented within their uncertainties. Specifically the linear regression showed that the average correlation coefficient was 0.97.

The excellent agreement between the CRDS and CEAS demonstrates their capabilities for accurately measuring N2O5 with high time-resolution of a few seconds, indicating a possibility to investigate the nature of night-time nitric oxide chemistry process.

This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key Research and Development Program of China and Open fund of Key Laboratory of Environmental Optics and technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Fig. (1) Scatter plots for the entire N2O5 dataset from the CRDS and CEAS (Image by LI Zhiyan) 

 

Fig.(2) The CRDS observations of N2O5 against CEAS with different relative humidities (Image by LI Zhiyan) 

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