Modelling air traffic-related non-CO2 emissions and their health impacts on airport- adjacent communities
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School of Engineering |
Master's thesis
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en
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106
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Abstract
Aviation is known to play an important role in the emission of greenhouse gases, with substantial research backing figures such as the industry’s 2.5% share of global CO2 emissions in 2023 (IEA, 2023). While this focus is in line with current climate concerns, other important externalities are less frequently addressed. This is the case of landing take-off (LTO) emissions and their health effects on local communities, which this thesis directly addresses. To provide concrete answers based on activity data, this work builds an end-to-end reproducible pipeline that connects aircraft movements to spatialized short and long-term health risks. A Tier-2, flight and engine-specific emission model is developed to estimate CO, NOx, SOx, PM, VOCs and PAHs masses using EUROCONTROL, ICAO and research-sourced data. Dispersion is simulated with the Lagrangian puff model HYSPLIT to produce 12-hour worst-case episodes aligned with downwind cities, as well as annual means via unit-tracer runs scaled by pollutant-specific emission rates. Health impacts are then quantified using epidemiology-based concentration-response functions (CRFs) with relative risks (RR) used for criteria pollutants and inhalation unit risks (IURs) for selected VOCs and PAHs. The methodology was applied to three hubs: Barcelona El Prat (BCN), London Heathrow (LHR), and Munich (MUC). Results indicate that NO2 dominates acute excess mortality within 0-10 km of airports, with ring-averaged excess risks during worst-case episodes ranging from 10^(-3) to 10^(-2), while SO2, VOCs (benzene, formaldehyde) and PM2.5 also contribute in a non-negligible manner to the acute health burden. For chronic effects, NO2 (10(^-3)) again is the main risk driver, followed by PM2.5 (10(^-5)) while other pollutants present negligible impacts. In parallel, operational analyses outline daytime emission waves and higher emission masses per LTO when widebody shares are greater, particularly for CO, SOx, NOx and PAH. As such, these findings provide evidence supporting both near-term operational interventions and longer-term fleet and fuel decisions.Description
Supervisor
Mladenovic, MilosThesis advisor
Trapote, CesarDe Villardi, Adeline