A New Type of Quartz Smog Chamber: Design and Characterization

Since the 1960s, many indoor and outdoor smog chambers have been developed worldwide. However, most of them are made of Teflon films, which have relatively high background contaminations due to the wall effect. We developed the world’s first medium-size quartz chamber (10 m³), which is jointed with 32 pieces of 5 mm thick polished quartz glasses and a stainless-steel frame. Characterizations show that this chamber exhibits excellent performance in terms of relative humidity (RH) (2–80%) and temperature (15–30 ± 1 °C) control, mixing efficiency of the reactants (6–8 min), light transmittance (>90% above 290 nm), and wall loss of pollutants. The wall loss rates of the gas-phase pollutants are on the order of 10^–4 min^–1 at 298 K under dry conditions. It is 0.08 h^–1 for 100–500 nm particles, significantly lower than those of Teflon chambers. The photolysis rate of NO₂ (J_NO2) is automatically adjustable to simulate the diurnal variation of solar irradiation from 0 to 0.40 min^–1. The inner surface of the chamber can be repeatedly washed with deionized water, resulting in low background contaminations. Both experiments (toluene–NOx and α-pinene–ozone systems) and box model demonstrate that this new quartz chamber can provide high-quality data for investigating SOA and O₃ formation in the atmosphere.