AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Data Merging of Size Distributions from Electrical Mobility and Optical Measurements
AXEL ZERRATH, Sherrie Elzey, Hee-Siew Han, TSI Incorporated
Abstract Number: 394 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract The measurement of size and concentration of aerosol to quantify potential exposure to nanomaterials has received increasing attention during the last years. The size range of interest covers usually a few nanometers to 10 µm (PM10).
A reference technology to determine size and concentration of particles in the nanometer range is electrical mobility. Recently TSI introduced the NanoScan SMPS, a small, portable and easy to handle version of the TSI Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS) (Elzey 2012), enabling easier access to occupational environments.
The size range of SMPS systems can be extended to coarse particles with light-scattering based instruments such as the Optical Particle Sizer (OPS).
Particle diameters determined from instrumentations are equivalent diameters, such as the electrical mobility diameter measured by the SMPS or optical diameter measured by the OPS.
We present here a novel data merging tool for optical diameter and electrical mobility diameter: Multi Instrument Manager (MIM). This software module compiles a single data set describing the particle size distribution from 10 nm to 10 µm. The MIM is easy to use and it allows reviewing and averaging data from SMPS, NanoScan SMPS and/or OPS. More importantly, when merging the OPS and SMPS/NanoScan distributions, the MIM can take the aerosol optical properties into account by automatically determining the aerosol effective refractive index.
The software allows several pre-settings, data averaging and adjustments. The curve fitting algorithm uses up to 3 modes of lognormal distribution function to curve fit the data. The presentation will show different merged data sets and merged options to demonstrate their impact on the composite fit accuracy.
Elzey, S., Caldow, R., Johnson, J.P., Grose, M., Morell, S. and Jensen, D. (2012), EAC 2012 proceedings, WG08S2O06