AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Development of a Miniature Plate Differential Mobility Analyzer (Mini-plate DMA)
QIAOLING LIU, Da-Ren Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University
Abstract Number: 224 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract Recent epidemiologic studies have shown the good correlation between the morbidity/mortality of human being and the concentration of ambient particles, especially ultrafine particles. A cost-effective aerosol sizer in a small package is thus in great demand for conducting either spatial air quality monitoring or personal exposure studies. Differential mobility analyzers (DMAs) are powerful tools for characterizing ultrafine particles. The use of existed DMA systems is however limited in these applications because of their bulky size, heavy weight and high manufacture cost. A miniaturized, cost-effective mini-plate DMA has thus been developed in this work to address the above issues. The prototype mini- plate DMA is in its rectangular configuration, where aerosol and sheath flows travel between two parallel metal plates. A high DC voltage is applied on one of two plates and electrically ground on the other in order to establish an electrical field for particle classification. The overall particle classification length in the prototype DMA is 1 15/32". Two identical DMAs were manufactured and the tandem DMA (TDMA) technique was applied to calibrate the prototype performance. NaCl particles were used for this evaluation. The piecewise linear deconvolution scheme (Li et al., 2006) was then applied to obtain the true transfer function of mini-plate DMA at various particle sizes. The detail result of this study will be presented in this talk.