AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Evaluation of a Twin-head Electrospray System for Nanoparticle Exposure Study
QIAOLING LIU, Da-Ren Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University
Abstract Number: 217 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract Because of its capability to generate/dispersing un-agglomerate particles in the sizes ranging from nanometers to micrometers, electrospray has been proposed in a wide range of applications, including material synthesis, drug delivery, particle encapsulation, nanoparticle exposure study and many others. Particles produced by electrospray are highly charged in the same polarity. Highly charged particles are easily deposited during the transportation by electrostatic effect. Charge reduction for electrosprayed particles is thus important to keep particles airborne. The charge reduction is often accomplished by exposing sprayed particles in a bipolar ion environment, generated by either AC-corona discharging or radioactive sources. An AC-corona discharger requires an AC power supply with two independent voltage outputs. Gradually rigorous regulation of using the radioactive sources prevents users from accessing them. The alternative and simple solution to the above dilemma is to use twin-head electrospray, in which one spray head produces positively charged particles and the other produces negatively charged ones. The collision of oppositely charged particles in the twin-head electrospray process reduces electrical charges on colliding particles. In this study, the performance of a new twin-head electrospray system (THES) was evaluated for animal exposure study. Nanoparticle suspensions of TiO2, ZnO and NiO were used in this evaluation. The detail result of this study will be presented in this talk.