AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Performance Characterization of a Handheld Nebulizer
TSUNG-HAN YANG, Ning Yu, Yu-Mei Kuo, Chih-Wei Lin, Sheng-Hsiu Huang, Chih-Chieh Chen, National Taiwan University
Abstract Number: 36 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract Vibrating mesh aerosol generators have been reported to have increased output efficiency, minimal residual volume, and high percentage of particles in the emitted respirable and fine particle fraction. This work aimed to thoroughly characterize a miniaturized vibrating mesh nebulizer, uniquely applying capillary force for solution delivery.
The miniaturized vibrating mesh aerosol nebulizer tested in this work consisted of a nebulization unit, a liquid reservoir and transport device. One triple-A battery was used to power the nebulizer, in order to miniaturize the device and operate for long hours. The vibrating mesh plate was placed on top of the solution transport device which was composed of two circular tubes, designed to deliver solution by capillary force. The aperture size of vibrating mesh plate was 15 micro-meter. There were 2375 tapered holes on the mesh and the between-aperture distance was 160 micro-meter. The effect of the orientation, including vertical, horizontal, and up-side-down, of the nebulizer was investigated. An aerosol size spectrometer was employed to measure the aerosol number concentration and size distribution. This nebulizer was mainly evaluated with 0.9% NaCl.
The power consumption of this device was 0.925 watt. It could continuously operate for over 6 hours. The feeding rate was around 0.15 mL/min and only negligibly affected by the device orientation. However, the residual was slightly influenced by the orientation, 7.0%, 5.6%, 2.6% for vertical, horizontal and up-side-down, respectively. The CMD of the aerosol output was around 0.55 micro-meter, with geometric standard deviation about 2. The aerosol number concentrations were 6,878, 11,724, and 16,101 #/cm$^3 for vertical, horizontal, and up-side-down, respectively. The most significant feature of this hand-held nebulizer was almost orientation independent. This made it ideal for medical use, especially for patients lying on bed. The residual volume could be further reduced by adjusting the design of the solution transport devise.