[Ultrafine particle number concentration and size distribution measurements in a street canyon]

A field experiment was conducted to measure concentrations and size distributions of particle (10 nm < D(p) < 487 nm) at four heights in an asymmetric street canyon on Beijing East Road in Shanghai, China. It shows that particle number size distributions are bimodal or trimodal lognormal in form. At a certain height in the range from 1.5 to 20 m, particle number concentrations and size distributions significantly vary with the height. Particle number concentrations in nuclei mode drop significantly and the mode diameters shift to the larger diameter. The variations of particle number concentration and size distribution in accumulation mode are less significant than that in nuclei mode. Particle number concentrations and size distributions slightly change with increasing the height in the range from 20 to 38 m. Concentrations of CO and PM(2.5) were also measured. Power laws are found to be well fitted for the concentration decay of total particle number, total particle volume, CO and PM(2.5). Due to the effect of the wind speed and direction, the total particle volume, PM(2.5) and CO concentrations are lower for Test I (high wind speed and step-up street canyon) than for test II (low wind speed and wind channeling along the canyon), at the meantime, the decay rates of the total particle number, the total particle volume, CO and PM(2.5) concentrations for test I are lower than for test II . No matter how the wind direction changes, the decay rates of the total particle number concentrations are larger than those of CO and PM(2.5), which clearly shows that coagulation and deposition besides dilution processes affect the total particle number concentration.