Selected Papers from an APCA Specialty Meeting

Abstract

The idea for this meeting evolved about a year and a half ago with Committee TP-7, the Source Measurements Committee, of the Air Pollution Control Association. Committee members had seen at that time that there was substantial progress being made in the field of continuous emission monitoring. The last conference on continuous emission monitoring, which was held in St. Louis, in March of 1975 had done much to start the dissemination of information about source monitoring systems; but then on October 6,1975, Performance Specification Procedures were promulgated by EPA and the field began to progress rapidly. Since that time, a lot has been learned by many people—both agency people and people in industry. Rapid progress has been made in instrumentation and with many of the regulations. It was intended a year and a half ago to try, in this conference, to answer a basic question: What is the state of the art of continuous emission monitoring? In selecting papers and asking people to present papers, we didn't really want to have research papers where we would look at details of research prototype instrumentation. Instead, we wanted to see where we are. What are we doing with what we have now in terms of instrumentation? What does it take to keep that type of instrumentation going? For that reason, we came up with four sessions. We have a session on industry experience: What is the experience of the utilities and other industries with the use of these monitors? We also have a session on regulatory approaches toward continuous monitoring: How do the agencies want to use continuous monitors in their programs; what is the future actually going to be, in terms of agency demands on continuous emission monitors? Then we have a session on instrumentation and testing. We included papers, by consultants, concerning the work that they have been doing with continuous monitors. Here we did include papers dealing with instruments that are coming onto the market. However, they are not research prototypes, but are actual working systems. Finally, and most important for this conference, we have a session on quality assurance procedures. In ambient air monitoring, quality assurance programs have been well established. But quality assurance is a relatively new idea to continuous emission monitoring, and there is a lot of action now to implement quality assurance procedures in all phases of source emission measurement. Quality assurance is one of the most important programs needed to be implemented within the agencies and within the utilities, in order to keep the systems operating continually. In this conference we want to focus on experience. What are people doing with continuous emission monitors? What are their quality assurance methods, and what are the characteristics of successful systems? What has happened in the past to make systems unsuccessful? We want to learn from other people's mistakes; learn what people are doing now to get those systems going. We want to have a better understanding of what we can expect from CEM systems with regard to what we put into them: What does it take in terms of manpower to keep these systems going, and if we put in that manpower, what kind of system will we then have? I hope that some of these questions can be answered here. Finally, I hope that we can get a better understanding of what we can expect in the future, both from the new systems that will be developed and from the agency programs. A 326-page Proceedings of this conference, SP-43, is available from the Publications Department, Air Pollution Control Association, P.O. Box 2861, Pittsburgh, PA 15230. Price is $20 for APCA members, $25 for nonmembers.