Pollution and atmospheric processes don’t just impact humans, but art and cultural heritage as well. For art conservation scientists, understanding how art interacts with the environment is critical to developing better methods for conserving cultural heritage. Our group applies techniques and methods across atmospheric chemistry to describe how cultural heritage interacts with the environments in which they reside. We aim to examine reactions on art surfaces, characterize the microclimate environments that develop in art enclosures for display and storage, and improve existing methods for monitoring and mitigating damage in art conservation.

In the atmosphere, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as isoprene and monoterpenes can react with oxidants in the gas phase, forming less volatile compounds. These compounds can, in turn, partition into aqueous phase i.e., cloud droplets, fog, particulate matter, where they can continue to react with oxidants and other compounds. Thus, our group is interested in exploring the fate and transformation of organic compounds in the aqueous phase. We aim to fully understand the influence of intrinsic and environmental factors on their fate, the mechanisms of reaction, and products formed.

In cities, 25% of particulate matter (PM) comes from traffic. While vehicle tailpipe emissions have decrease due to regulations, the same is not true of non-exhaust emissions (brake, tire, and road surface abrasion), which have become the dominant traffic PM source. Although their emission factors, size, chemical composition, and toxicity have been studied, little is known about the reactivity of these PM types. Our group aims to investigate how non-exhaust PM interact with other pollutants in the atmosphere (ozone, nitrogen dioxide, OH radicals, etc.) and the impacts this may have on urban air quality.

Wildfires release large amounts of gaseous and particulate pollutants into the atmosphere, including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, ash, VOCs, metals, inorganic and organic pollutants. There have been many studies measuring these pollutants, but there is less known about the complex interactions between these pollutants. Our group aims to investigate how the pollutants released during wildfires will react in the atmosphere and their environmental impact and lifetime.

Compared to outdoors, indoor environments are characterised by high surface-volume ratios, low photon fluxes and low oxidant concentrations hence, the chemistry of pollutants/ contaminants is expected to be different between these two. Humans spend ~ 90% of their time indoors, where they are exposed to a “cocktail” of contaminants emitted from various indoor activities such as cooking, cleaning and smoking but also outdoor pollutants that infiltrate indoors. Our group is interested in determining their fate and transformation under relevant indoor conditions and consequently, their health effects.

Our group develops and builds custom instrumentation to allow us to investigate the atmospheric processes we are interested in. Current instrumentation includes a coated-wall flow tube, an aerosol flow tube, a filter flow reactor and multiple photoreactors.