Ultrafine particles from Transportation – Health Assessment of Sources (ULTRHAS)

Duration:

01.09.2021–31.08.2025

Unit at THL:

Environmental Health

On other websites:

Norwegian Institute of Public Health

They may be tiny but ultrafine particles (UFPs) can pose a big health risk. For instance, inhalation of these nano-sized particles has been associated with respiratory diseases. Non-regulated nanoparticle emissions from transport sources belong to this category of high concern.

The EU-funded ULTRHAS project will reveal the health threats posed by nanoparticles from different transport sources. Specifically, it will address the impact of different transport modes, fuel technologies and wear components, including atmospheric ageing processes, on the physicochemical characteristics of particulate and gaseous emissions. To study the harmful effects in the lung, the project will apply emission measurement, exposure, and toxicity-testing approaches under highly controlled laboratory conditions.

Objectives

The overall objective is to improve risk assessment of air pollutants and to advice policy makers and regulators on more targeted mitigation measures against the emission components and sources that contribute the most to adverse effects. This will allow for development of more efficient strategies to improve urban air quality and promote health and wellbeing.

Implementation

The concept of ULTRHAS is to test a broad range of transport mode emissions (both exhaust and non-exhaust) under highly controlled laboratory conditions and provide detailed analysis of the physical and chemical characteristics and biological effects, through source campaigns that will constitute the main part of the project (WPs 2-5).

We will perform a hazard ranking of transport mode emissions, and through advanced bioinformatics make predictions on how physical and chemical emission characteristics influence biological effects, and then test these predictions by investigating model UFPs with varying characteristics (WP6).

The ULTRHAS toxicity testing strategy is based on a novel battery of advanced cell models and exposure systems to assess multi-tissue effects (WPs 3, 4 and 6), hitherto not yet applied in a similar scale in inhalation toxicity testing.