AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Experimental Study of a Miniature Dumbbell Electrical Aerosol Classifier (Dumbell EAC)
SIQIN HE, Da-Ren Chen, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 396 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract As the rising concern of the health effect due to the exposure of ultrafine particles, it is demanding to have the ultrafine particle sizers which are capable of measuring spatial distribution of particles. Low-cost ultrafine particle sizers make it feasible to achieve the measurement task. In our group we have developed the low-cost sizers of precipitator type (electrical mobility-based technique). To improve the sizing resolution while covering the particle size ranging from 10 to 500 nm, a miniature electrical aerosol classifier (i.e., Dumbbell EAC) has been proposed to replace the mini-disk precipitator in the developed low-cost ultrafine sizers. Different from the conventional EACs the dumbbell EAC has a curved classification region. The design of dumbbell EAC and its performance modeling had been presented in the AAAR 2011. In this study we have constructed the prototype EAC and experimentally evaluated its performance.
We evaluated the performance of the Dumbbell EAC using single-charged particles classified by a DMA. In the evaluation the concentration of charged particles at the downstream of the Dumbbell EAA operated at various voltage setting was measured by a CPC (TSI 3025). The penetration of charged particles through the EAC was then derived by the ratio of particle concentration at applied voltage and that at zero voltage. The performance of dumbbell EAC was then determined by its transfer functions describing the particle penetration as a function of the product of applied voltage and particle electrical mobility. The detailed result of this study will be discussed in this talk.