Abstract
Industrial and urban dusts were characterized by investigating their magnetic properties. Topsoil composed of technogenic magnetic particles (TMP) originating from areas affected by three ironworks, street dust mainly composed of traffic-related pollution, and particulate matter (PM) from urban agglomeration in Warsaw, Poland were investigated. Several magnetic methods, namely magnetic susceptibility, thermomagnetic curves, hysteresis loops, decomposition of isothermal remanent magnetization acquisition curves, and first-order reversal curves, were performed to evaluate the magnetic fraction of dust. Magnetite was the main magnetic phase in all types of samples, with a small amount of high-coercive hematite within ironworks and street dust samples. Significant differences were observed in the domain structure (grain size) of industrial and traffic-related magnetic particles. The grain size of TMP obtained from steel production was in the range of 5–20 µm and was predominated by a mixture of single-domain (SD) and multidomain (MD) grains, with the prevalence of SD grains in the topsoil affected by Třinec ironwork. The traffic-related dust contained finer grains with a size of about 0.1 µm, which is characteristic of the pseudo-single-domain (PSD)/SD threshold. Street dusts were composed of a slightly higher proportion of MD grains, while PM also revealed the typical behavior of superparamagnetic particles.
Highlights
Environmental pollution due to the continuous and rapid advancement of industrialization and urbanization has adversely increased over the last few years
We report the magnetic properties of airborne PM10 resuspended mainly by traffic and other human activities in urban areas and particles settled on the surface of the street and released by exhaust and non-exhaust traffic emission
During cooling below 600 ◦ C, magnetic susceptibility increased above those values obtained from the heating curve, which is a typical feature indicating the presence of new magnetite formed from magnetically weak minerals during heating
Summary
Environmental pollution due to the continuous and rapid advancement of industrialization and urbanization has adversely increased over the last few years. The deposition and input of these magnetic particles in the surrounding environment leads to the magnetic enhancement of topsoils, atmospheric air, and street dust within industrial and urban areas and nearby the pollution sources [5,6,7]. It is well documented that biomass burning, coal burning, metal smelting, solid waste recycling, and similar industrial processes can increasingly pollute the surrounding environment. Road traffic is another major source of magnetic particles in urban areas, which results in a magnetic enhancement of roadside soils [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. The Fe-rich magnetic particles originating from non-natural sources are known as “technogenic magnetic particles” (TMP) [10,15,16]
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