Scholarly record

EXAMINING COMPONENT STRUCTURE OF DUST EMISSIONS FROM INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES AS A TOOL FOR CREATING A CONTROL AND MONITORING PROGRAM

S. Yu. Zagorodnov

Abstract

Production activities performed by industrial enterprises involve ambient air contamination, including that with solid dust pollutants. As it is obvious from every-day practices, in most cases industrial enterprises with emissions containing a substantial fraction of solid dusts include suspended particles (TSP) in their control programs. A risk caused by an enterprise for population living on nearby territories is often assessed as per a sum of suspended particles contained in emissions; these data are also applied to work out administrative actions and to substantiate the necessity to implement activities aimed at environmental protection. But still, experience accumulated due to research accomplished in the sphere proves that solid dust emissions from industrial enterprises are a poly-disperse and a multi-component mixture with complicated chemical structure; this mixture contains both organic and non-organic admixtures, including highly and extremely hazardous ones. In such cases control over ambient air contamination performed as per TSP contents sometimes leads to specific toxic components being concealed when such components are emitted into the air, and it will eventually result in underestimating health risks; sometimes, it can result in overestimating hazardous impacts exerted by an enterprise when it is next to impossible to separate dusts emitted from an industrial object under control and emissions discharged by other sources. An industrial enterprise dealing with mining was chosen as a research object. Emission samples and air samples were taken via active sampling at dust emission sources and at reference points in a zone influenced by the chosen enterprise. Dust concentration in samples was determined with a gravimetric technique and a laser analyzer. Particles morphology and component structure was determined via electronic microscopy performed on high-resolution scanning microscope (with magnification from 5 to 300,000) with S3400N «HITACHI» x-ray fluorescent device. A chemical structure was identified via x-ray phase analysis of samples performed with XRD-700 «Shimadzu» x-ray diffractometer. The accomplished research allowed to determine a component structure of dusts emissions and dust contamination structure at a boundary of the reference territory. It was detected that chemical structure of dust contamination at the reference territory boundary was substantially different from emissions discharged from the examined sources. It may be assumed that dust contamination at the reference points doesn't occur due to activities performed by the chosen enterprise but is determined by other sources (for example, other industrial enterprises, dust being blown off open soil spots, motorways, etc.). Therefore, control over TSP at the reference territory boundary doesn't describe impacts exerted by stationary sources belonging to the examined enterprise. Basing on the research results, the authors made some recommendations on approaches to creating relevant programs for control and monitoring over dust emissions from industrial enterprises.

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