he Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments of 1990 are inT tended to reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by 70 to 90%. They specifically designate 189 compounds as hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). The EPA estimates that the aerospace industry generates 208,000 tons per year of HAPs plus an additional 145,000 tons per year of VOCs. Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards ...

Lung cancer is a leading cause of deaths in cancer. Hence, developing early-stage diagnostic tests that are non-invasive, highly sensitive, and specific is crucial. In this study, we investigated to determine whether biomarkers derived from urinary volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can be used to discriminate between lung cancer patients and normal control patients. The VOCs were extracted from...

Direct human emissions are known to contribute volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to indoor air via various mechanisms. However, few measurements that determine the emissions of a full suite of occupant-associated VOCs are available. We measured occupant-related VOC emissions from engineering students in a classroom using a proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTRTOF-MS). T...

Lasers and laser spectroscopic techniques have been extensively used in several applications since their advent, and the subject has been reviewed extensively in the last several decades. This review is focused on three areas of laser spectroscopic applications in atmospheric and environmental sensing; namely laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS), and photolumin...

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and odors in cattle rumen gas have been characterized by in-vivo headspace sampling by solid-phase microextraction (SPME) and analysis by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry-olfactometry (GC-MS-O). A novel device enabling headspace SPME (HS-SPME) sampling through a cannula was designed, refined, and used to collect rumen gas samples from steers. A Carboxen-pol...

Approximately 100 billion aluminum cans are produced annually, mainly for the beverage industry. Early technologies for decorating the cans often used solvent-based coatings containing solvents at concentrations of -70% to 75% by volume (Randall 1992). The solvent composition was typically a mixture of aliphatic hydrocarbons, aromatics, ethers, cellosolves, and acetates. Unfortunately, this met...