New Methods to Determine PAH Emission Dynamics During Electrode Mass Processing

New measurement techniques aiming to achieve a better understanding of the PAH emissions dynamics during production of electrode paste briquettes were tested. Traditional sampling method requires several hours of sampling to get enough PAH components on the adsorbent material to perform reliable analysis. As the process is changing from one batch to the next, emissions cannot be expected to be constant over time. Better time resolution is essential to increase the understanding of emission variations. Thermal desorption (TD) tubes allow for sampling times as short as 10 min. The SINTSENSE, a standalone photo ionization detector (PID) implementation allows for continuous emission monitoring providing online data second by second. However, the SINTSENSE will only report a total hydrocarbon estimate, with no differentiation between individual components. Comparing results from these 3 methodologies gives interesting findings on the emission dynamics and variations in composition, in addition to benchmarking the individual measurement techniques.