Improved, GC-O Based, Malodor Assessment of Swine CAFO's with Novel Air Sampling Technology

Hundreds of volatile chemicals have been reported as emissions from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These emissions are environmental concerns as a result of their impact on odor and general air quality. Volatiles emission monitoring of CAFOs is largely performed utilizing downwind air samples captured in Tedlar sampling bags. Published studies have indicated that this approach is not appropriate for this application due to the rapid loss of critical semi-volatiles to surface adsorption. Phase I efforts resulted in the identification of an improved material for construction of air sampling bags: metalized FEP (Teflon®) films. Utilizing odorous p-cresol as the semi-volatile challenge compound, metalized FEP containers consistently resulted in an approximate 3 fold recovery increase relative to Tedlar equivalents. This Phase II project proposes capitalizing on two key features of this material, the relative inertness of the FEP inner surface and outer surface metalization, in the development of an improved and commercially viable air sampling device. Product development and evaluation goals for this Phase II project are: (1) prototype optimization of metalized FEP whole-air containers for CAFO odor assessment: (2) equivalency assessment relative to current passivated steel canister devices for general trace volatiles emission protocols and (3) prototype thermal desorption interface, coupling the optimized metalized FEP container with sorbent tube volatiles collection: enabling near-source volatiles collection by sorbent tube and in-laboratory whole-air sample reconstitution for odor assessment.