Abstract

The objective of this research was to analyze the impact of emissions from marine diesel engines. Towards this goal, for the first time, emission measurements from the stack and plume of in-use ships were combined with measurements of emissions at monitoring stations in Southen California Air Basin to provide a panaromic view of impact of marine engines on port communities. Further, the emissions from marine engines were compared with emissions from other mobile sources of pollution to assess their relative contributions to the environmental impact.

In-use emission measurement studies were conducted to characterize emissions from the main engines of three major classes of ocean going vessels (OGVs): SuezMax class tanker, PanaMax class and Post PanaMax container vessels running on heavy fuel oil. Emission factors for different gases, PM_2.5 (particulate matter of diameter < 2.5 μm) mass, size resolved PM composition, elemental and organic carbon, selected hydrocarbon species (PAHs, carbonyls, and n-alkanes), were measured for each of the main engines, as well as the auxiliary engine and the boiler for the SuezMax class vessel. This research has enabled the scientific and regulatory communities move forward by providing a comprehensive emission measurement results from three different ocean going vessel types at sea.

The emission measurement studies were combined with an assessment of the penetration of primary fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) from ship emissions within the Southern California Air Basin (SoCAB). The key to this approach was demonstrating that vanadium and nickel were robust markers for the combustion of heavy fuel oil in OGVs. This study presents one of the kind modeling approach for determining the impact of primary particulate emissions from OGVs upon other worldwide communities downwind of port operations. The results verified the CMB approach that was previously used. To provide a comprehensive outlook on atmospheric transformation of emissions, the first joint shipboard and airborne study was designed and executed. The study provided the knowledge on relationship between shipboard and airborne measurements and allowed a better understanding of how to characterize the emissions from marine vessels. Finally, this thesis presents a comparison of fuel specific regulated emissions (grams of emissions per kg CO₂ basis) for different on-road and off-road sources of diesel emissions, following a unified approach of in-use tests and analysis protocols. Such a comparative study gives a single platform to compare the emmisions from different sources to determine their relative importance and to probe the similarities and differences in the nature of emissions from each source.