Secondary organic aerosol formation initiated from reactions between ozone and surface-sorbed squalene

Previous research has shown that ozone reactions on surface-sorbed d-limonene can promote gas phase secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation indoors. In this work, we conducted 13 steady state chamber experiments to measure the SOA formation entirely initiated by ozone reactions with squalene sorbed to glass, at chamber ozone of 57–500 ppb for two relative humidity (RH) conditions of 21% and 51%, in the absence of seed particles. Squalene is a nonvolatile compound that is a component of human skin oil and prevalent on indoor surfaces and in settled dust due to desquamation. The size distributions, mass and number secondary emission rates (SER), aerosol mass fractions (AMF), and aerosol number fractions (ANF) of formed SOA were quantified. The surface AMF and ANF are defined as the change in SOA mass or number formed, respectively, per ozone mass consumed by ozone–squalene reactions. All experiments but one exhibited nucleation and mass formation. Mass formation was relatively small in magnitude and increased with ozone, most notably for the RH = 51% experiments. The surface AMF was a function of the chamber aerosol concentration, and a multi-product model was fit using the ‘volatility basis set’ framework. Number formation was relatively strong at low ozone and low RH conditions. Though we cannot extrapolate our results because experiments were conducted at high air exchange rates, we speculate that this process may enhance particle number more than mass concentrations indoors.