Online coupling of pure O2 thermo-optical methods - 14C AMS for source apportionment of carbonaceous aerosols

This paper reports on novel separation methods developed for the direct determination of 14C in organic carbon (OC) and elemental carbon (EC), two sub-fractions of total carbon (TC) of atmospheric air particulate matter. Until recently, separation of OC and EC has been performed off-line by manual and time-consuming techniques that relied on the collection of massive CO2 fractions. We present here two on-line hyphenated techniques between a Sunset OC/EC analyzer and a MICADAS (MIni radioCArbon DAting System) accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) equipped with a gas ion source. The first implementation facilitates the direct measurement in the low sample size range (<10 μg C) with high throughput on a routine basis, while the second explores the potential for a continuous-flow real-time CO2 gas feed into the ion source. The performance achieved with reference materials and real atmospheric samples will be discussed to draw conclusions on the improvement offered in the field of 14C aerosol source apportionment.