Abstract
The increase of traffic and the rising energy consumption mean a challenge to the air pollution control and to environmental protection. Measures of air pollution control concentrated primarily on the reduction of gaseous pollutants. However, in the field of air hygiene in Central Europe, especially the load of near-surface atmospheric dust becomes threatening to human health. A SIMS microprobe for ultra fine feature analysis is used to image the elemental composition at the surface of submicrometer urban dust particles collected at two measurement stations in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The NanoSIMS 50 has been chosen because it creates one intensity image for each selected element in a high spatial resolution down to 50 nm. The atmospheric fine dust consists of a mixture of organic and inorganic compounds. The elemental composition at the surface of particles was studied using a global image segmentation technique to separate the signal from the background of the particles. The analysis of the binary intensity images was carried out using several shape and proximity measures. The patch shape complexity and distribution for industrial/urban particles were found to differ significantly from the solids collected from a forest site. We conclude that the methodology developed in the study is a reliable tool to differentiate between potential sources of airborne particulate matter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Benninghoven, A. (1994). Chemical analysis of inorganic and organic surfaces and thin films by static time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS). Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 33, 1023–1043.
Bogaert, J., Rousseau, R., Van Hecke, P., & Impens, I. (2000). Alternative perimeter-area ratios for measurement of 2-D shape compactness of habitats. Applied Mathematics and Computation, 111, 71–85.
Brunekreef, B., & Holgate, S. T. (2002). Air pollution and health. The Lancet, 360, 1233–1242.
Castner, D. G. (2003). Surface science: View from the edge. Nature, 422, 129–130.
De Boer, D. H. (1997). An evaluation of fractal dimensions to quantify changes in the morphology of fluvial suspended sediment particles during baseflow conditions. Hydrological Processes, 11, 415–426.
Geiser, M., Schürch, S., & Gehr, P. (2003). Influence of surface chemistry and topography of particles on their immersion into the lung’s surface-lining layer. Journal of Applied Physiology, 94, 1793–1801.
Gonzales-Barron, U., & Butler, F. (2006). A comparison of seven thresholding techniques with the k-means clustering algorithm for measurement of bread-crumb features by digital image analysis. Journal of Food Engineering, 74, 268–278.
Guerquin-Kern, J.-L., Wu, T.-D., Quintana, C., & Croisy, A. (2005). Progress in analytical imaging of the cell by dynamic secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS microscopy). Biochemica Biophysica Acta, 1724, 228–238.
Gustafson, E. J., & Parker, G. R. (1992). Relationships between landcover proportion and indices of landscape spatial pattern. Landscape Ecology, 7, 101–110.
Hoppe, P. (2006). NanoSIMS: A new tool in cosmochemistry. Applied Surface Science, 252, 7102–7106.
Järup, L. (2003). Hazards of heavy metal contamination. British Medical Bulletin, 68, 167–182.
Junk, J., Helbig, A., & Krein, A. (2009). Mortality rates and air pollution levels under different weather conditions – An example from Western Europe. International Journal of Environment and Waste Management, Special issue: Urban Air pollution, 3 (in press).
Junk, J., Helbig, A., & Lüers, J. (2003). Urban climate and air quality at Trier, Germany. International Journal of Biometeorology, 47, 230–238.
Krein, A., Audinot, J.-N., Migeon, H.-N., & Hoffmann, L. (2007). Facing hazardous matter in atmospheric particles with NanoSIMS. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 14, 3–4.
Lechene, C., Hillion, F., McMahon, G., Benson, D., Kleinfeld, A. M., Kampf, J. P., et al. (2006). High-resolution quantitative imaging of mammalian and bacterial cells using stable isotope mass spectrometry. Journal of Biology, 5, 20–40.
Li, H. (1990). Spatio-temporal pattern analysis of managed forest landscapes: A simulation approach. Ph.D. thesis. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University, 166 pp.
Li, D.-H., & Ganczarczyk, J. (1989). Fractal geometry of particle aggregates generated in water and wastewater treatment processes. Environmental Science and Technology, 23, 1385–1389.
Logan, B. E., & Kilps, J. R. (1995). Fractal dimensions of aggregates formed in different fluid mechanical environments. Water Research, 29, 443–453.
Mandelbrot, B. B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature. New York: Freeman.
McGarigal, K., Cushman, S. A., Neel, M. C., & Ene, E. (2002). FRAGSTATS: Spatial pattern analysis program for categorical maps. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts. Available at the following website: www.umass.edu/landeco/research/fragstats/fragstats.html (2008-03-17).
Meibom, A., & Frei, R. (2002). Evidence for an ancient osmium isotopic reservoir in Earth. Science, 296, 516–518.
Meibom, A., Sleep, N. H., Chamberlain, C. P., Coleman, R. G., Frei, R., Hren, M. T., et al. (2002). Re–Os isotopic evidence for long-lived heterogeneity and equilibration processes in the Earth’s upper mantle. Nature, 419, 705–708.
Otsu, N. (1979). A threshold selection method from gray-level histogram. IEEE Transactions on System Man Cybernetics, 9, 62–66.
Pope 3rd, C. A., Burnett, R. T., Thun, M. J., Calle, E. E., Krewski, D., Ito, K., et al. (2002). Lung cancer, cardiopulmonary mortality, and long-term exposure to fine particulate air pollution. Journal of the American Medical Association, 287, 1132–1141.
Slodzian, G., Daigne, B., Girard, F., Boust, F., & Hillion, F. (1992). Scanning secondary ion analytical microscopy with parallel detection. Biology of the Cell, 74, 43–50.
Storms, H. A., Brown, K. F., & Stein, J. D. (1977). Evaluation of a caesium positive ion source for secondary ion mass spectrometry. Analytical Chemistry, 49, 2023–2030.
Whalley, W. B., & Orford, J. D. (1989). The use of fractals and pseudofractals in the analysis of two-dimensional outlines: Review and further exploration. Computational Geosciences, 15, 185–197.
World Health Organisation (2004). Particulate matter air pollution: How it harms health. Fact sheet EURO/04/05. Berlin: WHO.
Zinner, E. (1998). Stellar nucleosynthesis and the isotopic composition of presolar grains from primitive meteorites. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 26, 147–188.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the assistance of François Barnich and Jean-François Iffly with laboratory and fieldwork. The authors thank the National Research Fund of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg for the funding of this study in the frame of the project “Analyse d’échantillons environnementaux à l’échelle du nanometer.”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Krein, A., Udelhoven, T., Audinot, JN. et al. Imaging Chemical Patches on Near-surface Atmospheric Dust Particles with NanoSIMS 50 to Identify Material Sources. Water Air Soil Pollut: Focus 8, 495–503 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11267-008-9182-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11267-008-9182-x