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Atmospheric Chemistry: HIRAC Group
The Highly Instrumented Reactor for Atmospheric Chemistry (HIRAC) is a NERC funded atmospheric simulation chamber developed to bridge the divide between the study of elementary reactions in the lab, and large scale field work. Unlike many other atmospheric simulation chambers HIRAC allows researchers the unique ability to control temperature, pressure and photolysis rates during experiments and to measure radical concentrations.
Just as the name suggests, HIRAC has a broad range of instrumentation based on different detection techniques so that we can accurately monitor the chemistry occurring inside the chamber. HIRAC has been funded to carry out a number of exciting and novel experiments to answer some of the important questions remaining in atmospheric chemistry. We also plan to use the chamber to test and develop field measurement techniques.
HIRAC is a member of the EUROCHAMP (Integration of European Simulation Chambers for Investigating Atmospheric Processes) network of European chambers.
News
CH3O2 Intercomparison
The above figure shows an example of the excellent comparison between CH3O2 measured using the FAGE methodology (red) with that determined by CRDS (black). The FAGE methodology has been developed at Leeds, whilst the CRDS studies for CH3O2 was developed by Grant Ritchie's group in Oxford and brought up to Leeds for an intercomparison in...
AGU Presentation by Alex Brennan
PhD student Alex Brennan give an oral presentation at the recent AGU conference in New Orleans. Alex's talk was on the intercomparison with FAGE and CRDS measurements of HO2. The good agreement between these very different methods for monitoring this crucial atmospheric intermediate goes a long way to eliminating the potential for systematic errors in...
Gordon Conference Presentation
Lavinia presented a poster at the prestigious Gordon Research Conference in Atmospheric Chemistry on work taking place on the NERC INFAMOS grant on the development of new methods for RO2 detection and on intercomparisons of FAGE and CRDS based methods for radical analysis. The poster is available in the poster section of the HIRAC site...