10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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Investigation of the Feasibility of Workplace On-Site Ultrafine Particle Respiratory Deposition Measurement
YI CHEN, Wei-Chung Su, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Abstract Number: 608 Working Group: Workplace Aerosol
Abstract Workplace ultrafine particles (UFPs) are an essential occupational health concern. It is vitally important to investigate the deposition of UFP in the human respiratory tract in order to correctly estimate UFP inhalation dosimetry for related workers. However, to date, UFP respiratory deposition experiments can only be conducted in laboratory settings using laboratory-regenerated UFPs which are considered not representative of the actual UFPs shown in the real workplace. As a result, the applications of these laboratory-based lung deposition data are limited. To improve the representativeness and application of the UFP lung deposition data as well as to overall advance the experimental method of UFP respiratory deposition study, this research developed an improved experimental approach to conduct UFP lung deposition experiments. The goal of this research is to enable on-site workplace UFP respiratory deposition measurement. The improved approach was designed by using two SMPS units, a human lower airway replica, and a series of modified airway replicas to directly estimate the UFP respiratory deposition fraction in each lung generation on the airway replica. The initial deposition data obtained from employing UFP surrogates showed that UFP lung deposition in individual lung generation can be efficiently and systematically measured. This result demonstrates the feasibility and the suitability of applying the improved experimental approach to workplaces with UFP exposure concerns for assessing worker’s UFP inhalation dosimetry.