Biodiesel, Fossil Diesel and their Blends: Chemical and Toxicological Properties

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The worlds air pollution problems are increasingly been related to automotive exhaust emissions. The more frequent implementation of diesel and biodiesel blends in passenger vehicle engines have gradually produced a new ecotoxicological profile of urban and rural air pollution, where nanoparticles, volatile exhaust fractions, microparticles and aerosol agglomerates dominate the spectrum of emission species. The effects of these species are increasingly associated with cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer and increase in all-cause mortality in the human population particularly in urban and highly trafficked areas. Also, the size of particles and agglomerates from exhaust has been related to particular diseases, risks of contracting types of pathologies and development of cardiovascular complications. PM2.5, PM10 and nanoparticles have therefore selectively been reviewed in this literature review for adverse health effects. With particular focus has biodiesel blending been extensively reviewed for chemical species and associated adverse health effects. The reviewed data suggests that the legislatory environmental health organs worldwide are not updated with the serious nature of air pollution and that filtering technologies, fuel types and threshold values for particle content in the air are not up to date with the medical and pathophysiological findings that have been acquired pr 2010.

Av: Sergio Manzetti, Otto Andersen, Jan Czerwinski. I: Biodiesel: Blends, Properties and Applications. Eds: Jorge Mario Marchetti, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and Zhen Fang, Chinese Academy of Sciences