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Three indoor sources (a gas stove, an electric stove, and an electric toaster oven) of ultrafine particles (UFPs) have been studied in an instrumented test house on the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Previous studies have reported the concentration of ultrafine particles indoors due to cooking, but have been limited to particles with diameters greater than 10 nm. New technology now makes it possible to measure particles as small as 2 nm. Therefore, NIST conducted a study to measure typical concentrations and estimate emission rates and coagulation rates of UFPs in the size range from 2 to 64 nm. More than 150 tests were completed. Peak concentrations from the gas and electric stovetop burners/coils occurred at a particle size of approximately 5 nm. Total number concentrations were as much as 10 times greater than reported in previous studies of particle sizes above 10 nm. Because of these high concentrations of very small particles, coagulation was the dominant process affecting the evolution of the size distribution after the source was turned off. The observed number concentration changes due to coagulation were fit by models including corrections for van der Waals and viscosity forces and fractal shapes. Indoor/outdoor ratios indicated that less than 5% of the <10 nm particles penetrated the house. This suggests that outdoor sources of these ultrafine particles will not contribute substantially to human exposure if indoor sources are present.
Wallace et al. (Thu,) studied this question.