Increasing regulatory pressure on particulate matter emissions originating at agricultural operations and processing plants has created a needed for additional industry specific data. The required data generally includes point source or stack sampling and non-point source data. In this paper, the focus is non-point source data usually collected with ambient air samplers. For small sources or small scale sampling campaigns researchers generally use EPA approved ambient samplers, such as the TEOM. However for large scale sampling campaigns where twenty or more sampling points are required, samplers like the TEOM become impractical due to their large size, high cost, low data storage capacity, and high power consumption. In the past, these drawbacks forced the researchers to work with very few sample points even when examining large processing plants that may cover several tens of acres. Consequently, the resolution of the resulting data sets was extremely limited, and verifying dispersion modeling results with this data is difficult if not impossible. In 2003, a project was initiated to develop a new air sampler that would mitigate the short comings of the currently available ambient air samplers. The completion of the design and development was eventually conducted at Oklahoma State University and the full system was deployed in 2008 with a total of 120 sampling points. Recent studies have incorporated the large scale comprehensive sampling setup and cover areas as large as 28 ha. This paper describes the design, development, and operation of this large-scale air sampling system.

Large-scale particulate matter air sampling system for high density data measurments

246th National Meeting (2013)

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