Abstract Submission - J. Reinmann - Environnement S.A
Validation Tests or PCDD/F Long-Term Monitoring Systems: Short Comings of Short Term Sampling and Other Lessons Learned
In several tests it was demonstrated that dioxin and POPs emissions of incinerators cannot be reliably monitored by manual short term sampling since such spot measurements represent only 1 – 2 ‰ of the yearly operating time of the plants during normal operating conditions. Especially during start-up periods of incinerators the dioxin emissions in the flue-gas can increase compared to normal operation up to factors of 1000 in raw gas and after bagfilters. Since continuous online monitoring of PCDD/F is not feasible for compliance measurements, the continuous sampling with e.g. AMESA (Adsorption Method for Sampling of dioxins and furans) is the method of choice for supervision of facilities. Therefore the interest in continuous dioxin monitoring has increased over recent years, which can be also noted by the fact that the European CEN/TC 264 WG 1 started a project to establish a standard for long-term sampling of PCDD/F and dioxinlike PCBs (as EN 1948-5).
One important topic for the standardization of sampling procedures is the application of validation measurements. The Environment Agency of England and Wales (UK) conducted one intensive comparison test of manual and automatic sampling systems. In this test systematic differences between the automatic and the manual systems were found for some test periods. These differences were not satisfactorily explained and were incorrectly interpreted in the published test report. This paper reveals and discusses the reasons for the inconsistencies between the AMESA and the manual short term measurements and gives some recommendations of what needs to be considered when performing long- and short-term monitoring tests in one series. The experiences of this work can be used as an important input for further validation tests including, e.g. EN 1948-5.
