Performance Study of a Portable Particle Sizer Under Practical Working Environment

Siqin He (1), Lin Li (1), Da-Ren Chen (1)

Washington University in St. Louis (1)

     Abstract Number: 682
     Last modified: May 14, 2010

Abstract
As the rising concern with health effects by personal aerosol exposure in industries and other closed environments, a low-cost portable particle sizer has been developed to meet the requirement of personal monitoring or spatially nanoparticle distributed measurement, which consists of three key components: a mini-unipolar charger (Qi et al., 2008) to electrically charge sampled particles, a miniaturized disk-type electrostatic aerosol precipitator (Qi et al., 2008) to alter charged particle distributions and a TSI PortaCount to measure the concentration of particles. The sizer further includes the on-board data reduction scheme to in-situ process the measured raw data, which is also stored in the included memory for later download.
In this study we first evaluate the performance of the above sizer in the laboratory setting using the particles generated from various spray techniques. Further evaluation of the sizer’s performance was carried out under the environments having the relative humidity and temperature ranges similar to those experienced in working places. The Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS) was used as the reference instrument in this study. The detail result of this study will be discussed in this presentation.