. Real-time Molecular Ion Detection and Chemical Composition of Aerosol Species in the Indoor Environment During Cooking

Abstract
Humans spend significant time indoors, and the chemistry of indoor environments has major ramifications for indoor air quality. Organic particulate pollutants are of high interest in the indoor environment, but have remained difficult to characterize in real-time. Extractive electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (EESI-MS) is a new technique to analyze organic aerosol in real-time, with molecular ion detection (limited fragmentation). Here we present the first deployment of EESI-MS to study indoor air chemistry. During Thanksgiving cooking simulations at HOMEChem, EESI-MS detected and quantified over 250 species in the aerosol-phase, including phthalates, fatty acids, and anhydrous sugars. Intercomparisons suggest that EESI-MS was able to quantify a large fraction of cooking-related aerosol, and the time resolution of EESI-MS (<10 sec.) allows for temporally variable sources to be accurately identified.