Acoem C-12 Met One portable, low-cost, high performance, industrial grade carbon monitor

Acoem Met One (also known as Met One Instruments, Inc) has developed an industrial grade black carbon “BC” sensor based on near infrared (880 nm) and optional UV (370 nm) attenuation across filter media upon which ambient PM is being deposited in real time.

This device, known as the “C-12 Carbon Monitor”, can operate for up to 2 months without user intervention and can report “BC” with sensitivity of less than 10 ng/m3. The base version of the C-12 Carbon Monitor, costing less than $3,000 and using a roll of filter tape allowing more than 1,000 spots, can be augmented with an additional illumination wavelength at 370 nm to facilitate source apportionment determination and various cyclonic separators at cut-points of PM1, PM2.5 or PM10. The C-12 Carbon Monitor comes standard with a cloud-modem, GPS, and can be set up and reporting data within 10 minutes. It is lightweight and self-contained in its own weatherproof enclosure.

In this 15 min presentation we will report on field tests conducted in China, and in the United States. In the Chinese tests we will provide collocated results with triplicate C-12 samplers run against a Magee Scientific AE33 in Beijing. In the field tests conducted in the United States we will report on data collected in southern Oregon and at a roadside station at a tollbooth in Newark, New Jersey (metropolitan New York City) also operating our BC-1054 MultiSpectrum Carbon Monitor. The C-12 Oregon data was collected during a fire event and included both 370 nm and 880 nm illumination results and demonstrated the usefulness of the UV illumination wavelength in determining whether the monitored BC arose from fossil fuel or biomass combustion. The New Jersey results demonstrate the ability of the C-12 to respond to rapid changes in BC arising from idling diesel-powered trucks.

[This abstract by Acoem Met One was co-authored by David A. Gobeli, Ph.D., Jen Brown, Leah Miller, and Annie Chen* and presented by David A. Gobeli, Ph.D. at the 26th International Clean Air & Environment Conference hosted by the Clean Air Society of Australia & New Zealand (CASANZ) on 13 Sep 2022 in Adelaide, South Australia. *Beijing Met High-Tech Company]