AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Comparison of Aerosolization Devices for Colloidal Particles
SIQIN HE, Derek Oberreit, Kanomax FMT, Inc.
Abstract Number: 374 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract The properties of aerosol particles generated by nebulization-evaporation of a liquid sample are affected by the size distribution of the dispersed droplets as well as the concentrations of dissolved and discrete non-volatile residue. In this work, we measure and compare the droplet size distributions of four commercially available nebulizers. Additionally, we measure and compare the aerosol particle size distributions of colloidal samples aerosolized with these devices. We vary both the concentration of dissolved non-volatile residue within the sample as well as the number concentration of colloidal particles to explore the practical limits for each of the devices.
We also compare the aforementioned measurements to PSD measurements of electrospray generated aerosols. Electrospray aerosolization is the de-facto standard for generating gas phase nano-particles from liquid samples; however, electrospray aerosolozation has several limitations with respect to sample properties as well as stability and ease of use. We show that pneumatic type nebulization devices are able to achieve similar results compared to electrospray without the associated limitations.