Off-Site Exposure to Respirable Aerosols Produced during the Disk-Incorporation of Class B Biosolids
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 133, Issue 10
Abstract
Field experiments were conducted at a Class B biosolids land application site in central Arizona to measure, model, and source-track the off-site transport of aerosols emitted when biosolids were disk-incorporated into soils. Real-time monitoring provided time-resolved aerosol information sufficient for verifying both off-site concentration and off-site exposure time model results. Under the conditions considered and at a distance of from the aerosol source, biosolids disk-incorporation resulted in an intermittent exposure to biosolids-derived aerosol concentration between 15 and and an inhalable biosolids dose between 2 and . Transport modeling predicted that these doses will decrease with increasing wind speed. In addition, three DNA sequence-based biosolids source tracking methods were applied to aerosol samples and confirmed the presence of biosolids in aerosols at 5, 65, and from the aerosol source. Field measurements and modeling indicate that the nature of biosolids-derived aerosol exposure is a series of intermittent high concentration puffs, rather than a continuous low concentration.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by funding from the Water Environment Research Foundation, Grant No. UNSPECIFIED02-PUM-01 and the National Science Foundation, BES No. NSF0348455. The writers thank the City of Phoenix for assistance in site access.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 133 • Issue 10 • October 2007
Pages: 987 - 994
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 9, 2006
Accepted: Feb 28, 2007
Published online: Oct 1, 2007
Published in print: Oct 2007
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