Occupational exposure to ultrafine particles in a jet engine airport

Air traffic emissions represent an important contribution to human exposure also because in the last two decades they were not reduced in a significant way as the other sources. The existence and operation of an airport has a potentially significant impact on the environment and health of people living or working in its vicinity (Mazaheri et al., 2009) even if the geographic scale and resolution necessary to accurately characterize public health impacts from aviation are unclear. On the other hand, emissions of high performance jet engines are a special component of total aviation emissions so that U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates these type of aircraft consumed about 22% of jet fuel in the U.S. in 2008 (EIA, 2008). In the present study, the authors report an environmental monitoring aimed to measure the occupational exposure to ultrafine particles with particular attention to pre-flight operations in a jet engine airport. Air quality measurements were carried at different spatial scales: i) at a 500 m downwind receptor site, inside the airport area, representing the background for the airport; ii) in the vicinity of the airstrip and in the closest hangar to the site where ground operations take place; iii) personal monitoring for different kind of workers. Particle measurements were conducted using different instruments: i) a TSI Model 3936 Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS); ii) two TSI Model 3775 condensation particle counters (CPCs); iii) a TSI Model 3007 CPC; iv) a TSI model 3091 Fast Mobility Particle SizerTM (FMPS); v) a TSI Model 3550 Nanoparticle Surface Area Monitor (NSAM); vi) two Philips Nanotracer particle counters; a vii) TSI Model 3321 (APS). The average particle number concentrations at background scale were lower than 7×103 part. cm-3, with slight higher concentrations and lower mode during weekdays in respect to the night and weekends. The particle number distribution evolutions in the vicinity of the airstrip show that the mode is within 25 nm and the total number concentration suddenly changes during ground activities. In Figure 1, the statistics of the number concentrations measured at the different fixed sites and the personal exposures are reported. Personal exposure concentrations, as expected, are higher than fixed site monitoring ones. Maximum values are found for crew chief because of the lower distances experienced by these workers in respect to the main sources that have to be considered the jet engines.