AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Filter Testing Using Technetium-99m Labeled Airborne Particles
TSZ YAN LING, Lin Li, Kai Xiao, Shigeru Kimoto, Bradley Humphrey, David Y. H. Pui, Jerry Froelich, University of Minnesota
Abstract Number: 141 Working Group: Control Technology
Abstract Respirators are considered as an effective protection equipment against airborne particles, including radioactive particles. However, there is a lack of studies relating the performance of respirators against radioactive and non-radioactive particles. In this study, we reported a method to determine a suitable metric, namely number, area or mass, to represent the radiation penetration of filter media. A microfiberglass medim was tested with Technetium-99m (Tc-99m) labeled polydisperse particles with two different size distributions. The radiation penetration, when represented by the number median diameter of the polydisperse particles, was found to correlate better to the penetration obtained with monodisperse sodium chloride (NaCl) particles. This can be explained by the small fraction of the Tc-99m molecules contained in the test particles. The procedure demonstrated in this study will allow one to estimate radiation penetration from the measurements made by non-radioactive surrogate particles.