AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Generation of Aerosol Particles of Controlled Mixed Composition
VASANTHI SIVAPRAKASAM, John Tucker, Jay Eversole, Naval Research Laboratory
Abstract Number: 458 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract In arenas where aerosol particles need to be delivered onto surfaces of sensors as in explosive detection research, bigger aerosol particle generation is preferred so as to maximize deposition and avoid the exitence of aerosol with the air flow. When the concentration of analytes need to be kept low it is not feasible to scale up the aerosol size. One method to overcome this predicament is to increase the particle size by adding an inert component to the particle. This would permit a continuously adjustable range of analyte mass delivered by each particle and the particle size can be controlled by the amount of inert material added. We proposed to use PSL, glass or PMMA bead as the inert material and homogenous material like ovalbumin, NaCl and Kaolin as the analyte for feasiblilty test purposes.
We were successfully able to produce aerosols composed of dye-doped Pmma and ovalbumin using 2 types of generators from Sonitech and Microfab. The particle generator from Microfab is capable of producing particle on demand to greater than 3000 particles/sec. By measuring the fluorescence spectra of the particles on-the-fly we were able to establish that the particles were composed of the two materials at expected concentrations. While holding the concentration of the inert material constant, we were able to vary the concentration of the analyte to produce varying size particles.