TY - JOUR

T1 - Development and calibration of a modifiable passive sampler for monitoring atmospheric tritiated water vapor in different environments

AU - Feng, Bin

AU - Steinhauser, Georg

AU - Zhuo, Weihai

AU - Li, Zhiling

AU - Yao, Yupeng

AU - Blenke, Tobias

AU - Zhao, Chao

AU - Renz, Franz

AU - Chen, Bo

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.11375048), Shanghai Rising-Star Program (No. 19QB1404900), and Science and Technology Program of the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation (No. 2021-06). B. Feng is especially grateful for the Postdoctoral Fellowship supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. All authors also appreciate our collaborators (Mr. Mingxing Duan, Mr. Weile Hu, and Mr. Min Zhou) for their assistance in field calibration experiments and Dr. Yining He (Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine) for her assistance in statistical analysis.

PY - 2022/11

Y1 - 2022/11

N2 - Anthropogenic release of tritium from nuclear facilities is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades, which may cause radiation exposure to humans through the contamination of water and food chains. It is necessary and urgent to acquire detailed information about tritium in various environments for studying its behavior and assessing the potential radiation risk. In the atmosphere, although the passive sampling technique provides a low-cost and convenient way to characterize the dynamics of tritiated water vapor (HTO), a single, simple sampler configuration makes it difficult to collect sufficient and representative samples within the expected period from different environments. In this study, we systematically studied the impacts of sampler configurations on sampling performance and proposed a modifiable sampler design by scaling sampler geometry and adjusting absorbent to achieve different monitoring demands. The samplers were subsequently deployed at five sites in China and Germany for the field calibration and the measured results exhibited a good agreement between the adsorption process obtained in sites corrected with diffusion coefficient and the one calibrated in Shanghai. This suggests the feasibility of predicting sampling performance in the field based on known data. Finally, we developed a strategy for sampler modification and selection in different environments and demonstrated that using easily obtainable environmental data, our sampler can be optimized for any area without any time-consuming preliminary experiments. This work provides a scientific basis for establishing high-resolution atmospheric HTO database and expands the conventional empirical sampler design paradigm by demonstrating the feasibility of using quantitative indices for sampler performance customization.

AB - Anthropogenic release of tritium from nuclear facilities is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades, which may cause radiation exposure to humans through the contamination of water and food chains. It is necessary and urgent to acquire detailed information about tritium in various environments for studying its behavior and assessing the potential radiation risk. In the atmosphere, although the passive sampling technique provides a low-cost and convenient way to characterize the dynamics of tritiated water vapor (HTO), a single, simple sampler configuration makes it difficult to collect sufficient and representative samples within the expected period from different environments. In this study, we systematically studied the impacts of sampler configurations on sampling performance and proposed a modifiable sampler design by scaling sampler geometry and adjusting absorbent to achieve different monitoring demands. The samplers were subsequently deployed at five sites in China and Germany for the field calibration and the measured results exhibited a good agreement between the adsorption process obtained in sites corrected with diffusion coefficient and the one calibrated in Shanghai. This suggests the feasibility of predicting sampling performance in the field based on known data. Finally, we developed a strategy for sampler modification and selection in different environments and demonstrated that using easily obtainable environmental data, our sampler can be optimized for any area without any time-consuming preliminary experiments. This work provides a scientific basis for establishing high-resolution atmospheric HTO database and expands the conventional empirical sampler design paradigm by demonstrating the feasibility of using quantitative indices for sampler performance customization.

KW - Atmospheric monitoring

KW - Field calibration

KW - Nuclear facilities

KW - Passive sampler

KW - Radiation protection

KW - Tritium

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138044964&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.envint.2022.107505

DO - 10.1016/j.envint.2022.107505

M3 - Article

C2 - 36115249

AN - SCOPUS:85138044964

VL - 169

JO - Environment international

JF - Environment international

SN - 0160-4120

M1 - 107505

ER -