Recent studies have shown that vapor-phase bioreactors containing the fungus Exophiala lecanii-corni can remove nitric oxide (NO) and volatile organic compounds efficiently from waste gas streams. However, when NH4 accumulates in the bioreactor, the NO removal efficiency abruptly drops to 20 %. To achieve high NOx removals in the bioreactors, low NH4 levels must be maintained, or a different ni...

Toluene and a mixture of the isomeric xylenes are common organic solvents that have been implicated in false ethanol results produced by older models of the Intoxilyzer 5000, a breath alcohol analyzer that uses infrared spectrophotometry to quantitate ethanol in breath samples. A straightforward method is described which predicts this type of interference in analyses conducted on such models. T...

[1] Both surface and volume uptake can contribute to the removal of tropospheric gases by ice-phase precipitation and cloud particles. These processes were evaluated by depositing ice in the presence of several gaseous oxyhydrocarbons and analyzing the chemical composition of the deposit. Acetone, methanol, ethanol, n-propanol, n-butanol, tert-butanol, cyclohexanol, and toluene were tested. Vol...

Nude mice each attached to a respirator to avoid pulmonary uptake were exposed in a glass exposure chamber to 200, 1000 or 3000 ppm of benzene, toluene or tetrachloroethylene (perclene) for 2, 4 or 6 h. The animals were killed at the end of the study and the amount of each solvent retained in the whole body was determined by gas chromatography. Skin absorption rates were calculated from the amo...

Butanol, ether, toluene, and hexane, which have Henry's constants ranging from 0.0005 to 53, were used to investigate the effects of substrate solubility or availability on the removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in trickle-bed biofilters. Results from this study suggest that, although removal of a VOC generally increases with a decrease in its Henry's constant, an optimal Henry's cons...