Main Activities
Environmental Research Laboratory provides research activities and service provision in the field of air pollution and environmental protection, through R&D projects and contracts with industries, public and private companies respectively. The activities of the lab are focused on two main actions:
1. Indoor and outdoor Air Quality
The current action focuses on the assessment and improvement of indoor and outdoor air quality through:
· Airborne Particulate Matter (TSP, PM10, PM2.5 and PM1) measurements with low and high volume controlled flow rate samplers.
· Volatile Organic Compounds (n-alkanes, aromatic H/C, aldehydes and ketones, sulfur compounds etc) sampling and analysis.
· Chemical analysis of particulate matter for the detection of OC/EC, ions and PAHs and cross-correlation with atmospheric pollution indicators in order to estimate their origin.
· Continuous inorganic compounds measurements (NOX, SO2, O3, CO, CO2)
· Isokinetic stack sampling for the determination of air pollutants emissions from industries
· Meteorological measurements (WS, WD, T, RH) in order to investigate the role of meteorology to the recorded air pollutants’ values.
· PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 measurements with low volume pumps in an indoor environment and results correlation with the outdoor concentrations, from simultaneous PM outdoor measurements
· Particle counts up to very high concentrations (particles/litre) and dust mass distribution in different size ranges in order to relate the results with health symptoms of the people living or working in a building
· PM personal cloud measurements with portable, small and unobstructive exposure sampling devices.
· Receptor modelling application (Principal Component Analysis, Positive Matrix Factorization, Chemical Mass Balance, ME etc) for the identification of sources and quantitative assessment of their contribution
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2. Photocatalysis
The current action focuses on laboratory and real scale applications of innovative titanium dioxide containing materials for testing the degradation of air pollutants in the urban and indoor environment.
· Materials’ ability to degrade air pollutants are examined through their competence to photocatallytically decomposes them under controlled external conditions. Within a Specially Designed Reactor, the evaluation of the materials’ photocatalytic performance is carried out through the calculation of certain photocatalytic and chemical kinetics parameters. Additionally, the mechanisms of the chemical reactions taking place between nanomaterials and gaseous pollutants are investigated.
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