CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR EARNS PATENT FOR ATMOSPHERIC MEASURING DEVICE THAT CAN AID IN UNDERSTANDING SMOG FORMATION

Judith Weinstein-Lloyd, a professor of chemistry at SUNY College at Old Westbury who holds a guest appointment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has earned a patent for a new tool used for quantitatively measuring elusive atmospheric chemicals that play a key role in the formation of photochemical smog.

Working with Brookhaven atmospheric chemist Stephen Springston and former SUNY Stony Brook graduate student Jun Zheng, Lloyd developed a device that measures atmospheric hydroperoxyl radicals - short-lived, highly reactive intermediates involved in the formation of ozone, a component of photochemical smog - in the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. The levels of these radicals can indicate which of a variety of chemical pathways is predominant in converting basic starting ingredients - hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and water vapor - into smog in the presence of sunlight.

“This announcement is further proof that Old Westbury is a small college with big talent,” said College President Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III. “The work of Judith Lloyd, and that of her colleagues, may one day help make clearer the forces impacting the climate we all experience and aid in improving the quality of the air we breathe.”

Better measurements will improve scientists’ understanding of the mechanisms of smog formation and their ability to select and predict the effectiveness of various mitigation strategies.

“The major goal of my work has been to understand how pollutants react in the atmosphere and how those reactions impact local and regional air quality,” said Dr. Lloyd, whose investigations into air pollution have led her in recent years to conduct field measurement campaigns both from surface stations or aboard aircraft in such places as Nova Scotia, Canada, Mexico City, Mexico, Houston, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee. “Using measurements from this device can help predict what smog mitigation strategy might be most successful for a particular set of atmospheric conditions - and make modifications to that strategy as those conditions change.”

A member of the Old Westbury faculty since 1978, Dr. Lloyd has independently secured more than $1.5 million in external funding for her research since she began studying atmospheric processes in 1990.

Because hydroperoxyl radicals are so reactive, getting accurate measurements is not easy. Various groups have developed detectors for hydroperoxyl radicals, but these have been cumbersome and costly. The new device is comparatively small, lightweight, and inexpensive, has low power requirements, and gives a sensitive, fast response. It works by detecting a “glowing” signal from a chemiluminescent compound - similar to the compound that makes fireflies glow - when it reacts with the hydroperoxyl radicals in atmospheric samples fed into the device during flight.

“The chemiluminescence produced in solution creates a strong and readily detectable signal without the need for complex amplification procedures,” said Lloyd.

The device has been tested in a mountaintop setting, but has not yet been deployed on an aircraft for a sampling mission. It is designed to be flown on atmospheric sampling aircraft, such as the Department of Energy’s Gulfstream 1, which has been used by Brookhaven and other national laboratory scientists for a variety of atmospheric studies.

This work was funded by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and by the National Science Foundation.

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