Ship emissions

When I planned to do my master thesis for the master Analytical Chemistry, I looked for projects in the public domain with a focus on data acquisition and processing. The Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate used a so-called sniffer instrument from TNO. The main function of this sniffer is to see whether ships were sailing on non-compliant fuel in the Port of Rotterdam, mostly in terms of their SO2 emissions.

The objective of my research was to compare different techniques which are available for analysis of ship plumes. The first part of the thesis contains a literature review for instruments able to measure sulphur dioxide emissions. In the second part I perform analysis on data obtained from several European agencies. It is the first time (to my knowledge) that multiple instruments were compared on such a large dataset (more than 8000 measurements).

Update 2022

Now I do work for TNO :) I am involved in maintaining the sniffer instrument. Indications are that a lot of ships are emitting too much NO and NOx, see this recent published paper in Nature communications. We are trying to get funding for a permanent NOx monitor at the current pole. This will allow us to measure NOx emissions from ships in the Port of Rotterdam 24/7.

Read more:

ILT MSc thesis MSc Presentation