posted on Oct, 20 2007 @ 02:09 PM
Jeez people this is not a hard solution.
Are you worried that planes are pouring down chemicals from miles up and that you are breathing them?
Well, one part of the question is answered: You are worried that the particulates reach ground level.
Do this:
1. Get an air pump that is regulated to run for days on end.
2. Get some air-monitoring tubes (solid-sorbent tubes, DAAMS tubes, whatever kind you want). They are readily and commercially available.
3. Get some 1/4" sylastic tubing and some splitters for the tubing.
4. Run a line of the tubing to the splitters. Split it out as many ways as you want to.
5. Put some manually adjustable flow restrictors in-line
6. Attach the air-monitoring tubes at the end of the lines.
7. Regulate the air flow through each tube to about 500 mL/min.
Here is what will happen:
When you start up the pump, record the time. Replace the tubes every four hours. Keep each set labeled.
When you have as many samples as you want, extract them with an organic solvent into gas chromatograph vials. Either way you do it, run the samples on
a gas chromatograph.
When you get the results, you can back-calculate the concentration in the air. You know the flow rate each sample was taken at and for how long, and
you know how much solvent you extracted it with, so if you balance your units properly you can do this.
Its a gas chromatograph, so everything will show up, even all the crap that regularly occurs in the air, like pollution, pollen, farts, etc., so you
will have a helluva time. Maybe if you used a mass spec with the GC you could identify stuff easier. You would have to have an extensive library
though.
But that's how a professional air-monitoring technician would do it.