Ambient air particles: The use of ion chromatography and multivariate techniques in the analysis of water-soluble substances

Seventeen water-soluble substances (of sodium, ammonium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, formate, methanesulfonate, glyoxylate, chloride, nitrite, nitrate, glutarate, succinate, malate, malonate, sulfate and oxalate) in 94 samples of particle matter the ambient air, collected over ten months, a suburb Belgrade (Serbia), were determined by ion chromatography. To apportion sources air pollution, log-transformed data processed applying multivariate techniques. Principal component factor analysis identified three main factors controlling variability: stationary combustion processes with highest loadings oxalate, malonate malate; landfill emission secondary inorganic aerosol characterized high levels nitrate sulfate; contribution mineral dust composed calcium chloride. The hierarchical cluster pointed out differentiation into five groups belonging to different variables inputs. For classification using nine selected ions, recognition ability linear discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbors, soft independent modeling class analogy 87.0, 94.6, 97.8 %, respectively. Time-series showed that traffic is more pronounced winter contrast influence, while effect waste exhibits no trend.