Fudong Liu
Xiaole Weng
Qiguang Dai- 1Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, Catalysis Cluster for Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformations (REACT), NanoScience Technology Center (NSTC), University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States
- 2College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
- 3Research Institute of Industrial Catalysis, School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Editorial on the Research Topic
Secondary Pollution in the Environmental Pollution Control Process: Production, Environmental Risks and Reduction
This research topic includes two contributions regarding the exploration of the composition and distribution of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and the factors that affect their distribution in the salt lake sediments, as well as the heterogeneous oxidation of secondary organic aerosols (SOA) tracers by ozone studied by in situ FTIR method. Both contributions can help the readers understand more about the natural transformation process of VOCs and SOA in different environments and conditions.
The first study is from Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Qinghai Provincial Key Laboratory of Geology and Environment of Salt Lakes (Lu et al.). It mainly focused on collection of thirteen sediment samples from a depth profile in the East Taijinar Lake, China, and analysis on the VOCs of different samples that were extracted by headspace solid phase microextraction. Different approaches including gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, gas chromatography-ion mobility spectrometry and X-ray diffraction were used to analyze the VOCs, alkanes, and minerals in the collected samples. It was found that thirty-four VOCs could be identified and classified into seven types, and the VOCs correlated positively with detrital minerals. Due to the consumption of organic matter (OM) by microorganisms, the formation of VOCs could occur in sediment. As mentioned by the authors, the results in this study clearly demonstrated that the OM from different biological sources and microbial activities played a critical role in deciding the composition and distribution of VOCs in the sediment.
The second study is from Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) (Wang et al.) which mainly focused on the chemical structure changes of several SOAs when exposed to high concentration of ozone for short periods, using the in situ FTIR method. The studied SOAs include erythritol, analogue of 2-methyl erythritol (AME) which is a tracer of isoprene SOA, and 2, 3-dihydroxy-4-oxopentanoic acid (DHOPA) which is a tracer of toluene SOA. The systemic results obtained in this study showed that, in the presence of high concentrations of ozone, the oxidation processes of AME and DHOPA were slow. These implied that AME and DHOPA could be considered stable in the atmospheric environment when ozone was the main oxidant. The authors suggested that the heterogeneous oxidation of organic tracers by different oxidants needs to be studied more comprehensively in the future, so better understanding about the roles of SOAs on global climate change and air quality can be achieved.
These two articles in this collection illustrate the importance of advanced characterization techniques in understanding the physical and chemical properties of volatile organic compounds and secondary organic aerosols in the natural transformation processes.
Author Contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s Note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Keywords: volatile organic compounds, heterogeneous oxidation, secondary organic aerosols, air quality, atmospheric environment
Citation: Liu F, Weng X and Dai Q (2022) Editorial: Secondary Pollution in the Environmental Pollution Control Process: Production, Environmental Risks and Reduction. Front. Environ. Chem. 3:874342. doi: 10.3389/fenvc.2022.874342
Received: 12 February 2022; Accepted: 21 February 2022;
Published: 04 April 2022.
Edited and reviewed by:
Ioannis V. Yentekakis, Technical University of Crete, GreeceCopyright © 2022 Liu, Weng and Dai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Fudong Liu, fudong.liu@ucf.edu; Xiaole Weng, xlweng@zju.edu.cn; Qiguang Dai, daiqg@ecust.edu.cn