The project aims to focus on an actual societal problem impacting the public health: an increased exposure of citizens to potentially harmful air emissions of emerging chemical and biological substances.
The quality of air we breathe when we walk, at home or at workplace is changing continuously together with the world around us. The current societal transitions (i.e., mobility, energy, circularity, food systems) have a large impact on the air components. We are witnessing daily political and societal debates about (emerging) industrial and agricultural emissions, urban pollution and exposure at workplace. In all these discussions, the uncertainty about the exposure to pollutants and their potential health effects plays a central role.
There is a clear need to improve our ability to dynamically measure air quality in situ and in real-time. Therefore, one of our ambitions in ExpACT is to develop methodologies to go beyond citizens science, and stakeholder engagement and including the ethical, legal and societal aspects of the technologies.
In this project team within the received € 840,000 to develop and apply two innovative techniques for in-situ detection and monitoring of the chemical exposome in air at different length scales.
(1) Field deployable mid-IR coherent open-path spectroscopy (COPS) instrument to measure chemical exposome components in air. This will be combined with the satellite spectroscopy for mapping the air pollutants with unprecedented accuracy, high spatial and temporal resolution.
(2) Mobile Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (ToF-MS) for real-time chemical analysis of volatile organic compounds and (organic) aerosols. Here, we go beyond the state-of-the-art by including an innovative particle inlet system that will allow the extension of the range of detectable molecules to semi-volatile, intermediate-volatile and low-volatile organic compounds (e.g. polyaromatic hydrocarbons - PAHs).
Simona Cristescu (TD lab): “I am grateful to my team members Amir Khodabakhsh and Joris Meurs who help me with taking this important role in such a unique project and we are looking forward to it!"
