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CC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
Accounting for plume rise of aircraft emissions in AERMOD
Atmospheric environment (1994), Vol.314, p.120106
12/01/2023
Appears in Aviation Sustainability Center (ASCENT)
Abstract
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) to assess the impact of airport emissions on air quality in and around an airport. AEDT incorporates EPA's (Environmental Protection Agency) regulatory model, AERMOD. The area/volume source algorithm in AERMOD is currently used to treat most airport sources including aircraft, which contribute a major fraction of total airport emissions. Aircraft emissions have horizontal momentum corresponding to the forward thrust of the aircraft. In addition, they have buoyancy corresponding to the heat rejected from the aircraft engine. These plume dynamics are not included in the latest version (v22112) of the area/volume source algorithm in AERMOD; the effects of the plume on ground-level concentrations are accounted through an initial plume height and width based on LIDAR observations at the end of runways. Model predictions based on this approach are likely to lead to overestimates of ground-level concentrations because they do not account for the increase of plume height with distance from the source. This paper proposes a plume rise formulation for aircraft emissions modeled with AERMOD. Plume rise is modeled using the weighted average of the characteristics of the aircraft that pass through the area/volume source during 1 h, the averaging time used in AERMOD. The buoyancy parameter used to compute plume rise is estimated using the aircraft engine characteristics: thrust, fuel burn rate, the velocity of the aircraft, air-fuel ratio, and the engine bypass ratio. The proposed plume rise formulation for AERMOD is evaluated using SO2 observations from the 2012 Air Quality Source Apportionment Study (AQSAS) conducted at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The results from the evaluation indicate that plume rise improves AERMOD's description of the qualitative behavior of concentrations measured in and around the airport.
•AERMOD doesn't account for aircraft plume dynamics in area/volume source treatment.•A proposed plume rise formulation for aircraft emissions modeled with AERMOD.•Account for momentum and buoyancy of jet exhausts that govern aircraft plume rise.•AERMOD's concentrations with plume rise are relatively insensitive to wind speed.•Results demonstrate improved model performance after incorporating plume rise.
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Details
- Title
- Accounting for plume rise of aircraft emissions in AERMOD
- Creators
- Gavendra Pandey - University of North Carolina at Chapel HillAkula Venkatram - University of California, RiversideSaravanan Arunachalam - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Publication Details
- Atmospheric environment (1994), Vol.314, p.120106
- Academic Unit
- Aviation Sustainability Center (ASCENT); Emissions
- Publisher
- Elsevier Ltd
- Grants
- 13-C-AJFE-UNC-014, 13-C-AJFE-UNC-016, Federal Aviation Administration (United States, Washington) - FAA
- Identifiers
- 99901050933401842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article