**Author details**

72 Advanced Aspects of Spectroscopy

(Lin *et al*., 2008).

types.

1996; Russwurm, 1999).

**6. Conclusion** 

livestock building behaves such as an accumulation chamber, and methane emission factor

As was described by Lin and coworkers an open-path Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy system can be used for monitoring of VOCs in industrial medium. They used this system to monitor VOCs emissions from a paint manufacturing plant, and they determined seven VOCs in ambient environment. The same system was also used to determine the VOCs in a petrochemical complex. The results obtained were correlated with meteorological data and were effective in the depiction of spatial variations in indentifying sources of VOC emissions. They also mentioned another important advantage of OP-FTIR spectroscopy such as the ability to obtain more comprehensive data than by using the traditional multiple, single-point monitoring methods. It can be concluded that OP-FTIR can be useful in both industrial hygiene and environmental air pollutat regulatory enforcement

Ammonia, CO, methane, ethane, ethylene, acetylene, propylene, cyclohexane, and O-xylene were identified as major emissions in a coke processing area from Taiwan using OP-FTIR system by Lin and coworkers (Lin *et al.,* 2007). Main gaseous byproducts (CO, CO2, CH4 and NH3) of thermal degradation (pyrolysis) of biomass in forest fires were determined accurately using OP-FTIR. The results obtained in this study can help to improve the modelling of the pyrolysis processes in physical-based models for predicting forest fire behaviour (de Castro *et al*., 2007). An other reasearch in this field was performed by Burling and coworkers who measured trace gas emissions from biomass burning of fuel types from the southeastern and southwestern United States (Burling *et al*., 2010) with the help of OP-FTIR. The authors detected and quantified 19 gas-phase species in these fires: CO2, CO, CH4, C2H2, C2H4, C3H6, HCHO, HCOOH, CH3OH, CH3COOH, furan, H2O, NO, NO2, HONO, NH3, HCN, HCl, and SO2. The emission factors depend on the fuel composition and fuel

All the advantages of OP-FTIR spectroscopy and all the studies mentioned above demonstrate the utility of OP-FTIR in measuring and monitoring of atmospheric gases. This technique has increasingly been accepted by different environmental agencies as a tool in the measurement and the monitoring of the atmospheric gases (Russwurm and Childers,

All these presented above show the importance of FTIR spectroscopy in environmental studies. The major advantages of this technique are: real time data collection and reporting, excellent sample-to-sample reproductibility, enhanced frequency accuracy, high signal-tonoise ratios, superior sensitivity, analytical performance. In addition, the measurement is very rapid so that a large number of samples can be analyzed. Consequently FTIR spectroscopy coupled with other techniques is widely used to determine the nature of pollutants (gaseous, liquid or solid), to monitor environment, to asses the impact of pollution on health and environment, to determine the level of decontamination processes.

was lower than the proposed by Emission Inventory (Briz *et al*., 2009).

#### Claudia Maria Simonescu

*Department of Analytical Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Applied Chemistry and Materials Science, "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania* 
