AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Performance Comparison of Aerosol Corona-based Mini-chargers for Miniature Ultrafine Particle Sizers
DI LIU, Qiaoling Liu, Da-Ren Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University
Abstract Number: 347 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract The concern of adverse heath effect resulted from ultrafine particles has led to the development of portable/miniature particle sizers for tempo-spatial measurements of ultrafine particles. Electrical-mobility-based technique has been applied in aerosol community to characterize the size distribution of ultrafine particles. Particles are required to be electrically charged to a known charge distribution in order to run the sizers and to retrieve the particle size distribution from measured raw data. Aerosol chargers are thus one of key components in electrical mobility based sizers. In our group we had previously developed the nanoparticle charger (in the cylindrical configuration) for miniature particle sizers (Qi et al 2008). It is a corona-discharge-based charger in which the discharge occurs at the tip of corona needle. The charge distribution of particles with the sizes less than 60 nm for Qi’s charger has been reported in the publication. The charge distribution data for particles with the sizes larger than 60 nm are however not given.
More recently, a mini-plate aerosol charger has further been developed for mini-sizers. Different from the Qi’s charger, the plate design is implemented and the wire is used for corona discharge in the mini-plate charger. More, no ion-driving voltage is applied in the mini-plate charger. In this study we performed the experiments to compare the performance of two mini- aerosol chargers, especially on the charge distribution of particles with the sizes larger than 50 nm. The comparison allows us to identify the suitable aerosol charger for mini-EAA and Mini-EAA applications. The detail design of both aerosol chargers and the comparison result will be presented in this talk.