AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Performance Study of the "Impaclone", a Miniature, Switchable Size-selective Inlet for a Compact Particle Sizer
SIQIN HE, Da-Ren Chen, Paul Greenberg, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 389 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract As response to the increasing concern of the health effect due to the exposure of submicrometer particles, lots of low-cost particle sizers enabling to measure the spatial distribution of particles are recently developed, with various designs based on the particle electrical mobility technique. However, the presence of large particles in the sampling stream often interferes the performance of these sizers. One of size-selective inlets to remove large particles is the mini-cyclones developed by Hsiao et al. (2009). Most of the conventional cyclone/impactor designs have fixed cutoff particle sizes, limiting the flexibility of sizers in use. To make the cutoff particle size switchable or variable, a new compact size-selective inlet, by integrating a cyclone and an impactor, was designed and tested in this study.
The efforts have been mainly devoted to the combination of a cyclone chamber and an impaction chamber. The prototype has a switchable cutoff size from 0.5 to 1 μm by splitting the flow operation for the cyclone and impactor. With the new design, the prototype improves the sharpness of the particle cutoff curves and the dust holding capacity. The experimental result of this study will be presented in the conference.