Characteristics and source apportionment of volatile organic compounds in an industrial town of Pearl River Delta

The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were continuously measured in the typical industrial town Shishan in Foshan in the Pearl River Delta region, and their characteristics of variability, Ozone Formation Potentials (OFP) and source apportionment were analyzed in 2019. A total of 56 VOCs species were detected during sampling time. The concentrations of TVOCs (total VOCs) were (39.64±30.46)×10-9, and the dominated VOC components were alkanes (56.5%) and aromatics (30.1%). The general trend of seasonal variation indicated higher concentrations in spring and winter. The classified VOCs were characterized by U diurnal variation. The range of diurnal variation of polluted period was obviously greater than that of unpolluted period.The relative incremental reactivities (RIR) showed that ground-level ozone formation in the study area was generally limited by the concentrations of VOCs. The OFP concentrations of VOCs were 107.40×10-9 with the highest contributions from aromatics (54.6%).The summed of the top 10 OFP compounds accounted for 80.3% of the total OFP and 59.9% of the TVOCs. The concentrations of the key active VOCs species were higher, which should be paid more attention. Probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) model was used to identify the sources of the VOCs.Solvent use(42.4%) and vehicle(25.8%) were the major sources of VOCs emissions in 2019, followed by industrial process(14.6%), fuel evaporation (7.9%) and biogenic emissions(1.7%). The result suggests that controlling the emission sources above would be an effective strategy to alleviate photochemical ozone pollution. © 2021, Editorial Board of China Environmental Science. All right reserved.