Development and application of a membrane-based thermodenuder for measurement of volatile particles emitted by a jet turbine engine

Measurement of volatile particles emitted by modern jet engines is a daunting task. Besides the complexity in sampling jet aircraft exhaust, the main difficulty lies at how to faithfully capture the phase-partition dynamics of volatile particles as they travel downstream from the engine exhaust nozzle. As a result, the physico-chemical properties of the exhaust are also transformed. We have developed a sampling instrument that aims at enabling study of the phase-partition dynamics. The objective of this research project was to design and evaluate a new thermodenuder for performing phase separation of the engine-emitted volatile particles. The backbone of the new thermodenuder is a thin metallic membrane. The membrane enables extraction of molecules that can be thermally desorbed from the condensed particulate phases and collected for subsequent chemical analysis. Toward realization of the technique in the future field aircraft emissions measurement we tested this new thermo-denuding device using laboratory-generated particles that were made of non-volatile or semi-volatile chemicals. The particle penetration efficiency, a measure of the device performance, of this thermodenuder was found to be better than 99%. Results obtained from the tests executed at a number of operating temperature conditions show reasonably good thermal separation. We have scheduled to apply this new device to characterize emissions from a T63 turboshaft engine in the spring of 2010 and are expecting to show the engine results at the conference. The test results based on the laboratory-generated particles were encouraging for the intended application. With excellent particle transmission efficiency and an ability to simultaneously measure the composition in the gas and particle phases of the engine particles, we believe the new technology will make a great contribution to measurement research of engine emissions.