Methodologies for estimating emission rates of hazardous gases from single point sources

Date

1995-12

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

Air pollution has been a problem for a number of centuries. One of the earliest air pollution problems was the smoke caused by burning of sea coal in lime kilns in London in A.D. 1285 (Cooper and Alley, 1986). The Industrial Revolution in the sixteenth century marked the advent of an upward trend in air pollution that continues to this day. The twentieth century has witnessed an exponential increase in air pollution. The development of chemical, petroleum and the automobile industries, to name a few, have added significant quantities of pollutants to the atmosphere.

What is air pollution? The word pollution is synonymous with contamination. Air pollution can therefore be defined as the presence of any solid, liquid or gas in quantities sufficient enough to cause some deleterious effect to the harmony of our environment. The word "harmony" is used here to include both health and well-being effects. The wellbeing encompasses nonhealth effects such as visibility reduction and crop damage. Substances such as sulfur dioxide and ozone have proven to have adverse impacts on human and/or animal health. A number of others, such as ammonia do not cause any direct negative effects on the human body at typical levels in the atmosphere, but create odor and visibility problems.

The sources of air pollutants are numerous and varied. The classification of these different sources is the topic of the first section of this chapter. In the next section, a brief discussion is provided on the importance and current status of air pollution modeling. The rationale for the choice of gases used in this research project is the topic covered in Section 1.3. The objectives of this research are outlined in Section 1.4. Prior research at Texas Tech University in this area is reviewed in the final section of the chapter.

Description

Keywords

Air -- Pollution -- Measurement, Gases, Asphyxiating and poisonous -- Measurement -- Mathematical Models

Citation