AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
A Performance Evaluation Method for Instruments for Aerosol Particle Size Distribution Measurement based on the Ttotal Number Concentration of Monodisperse Particles using Reference CPC
YOSHIKO MURASHIMA, Hiromu Sakurai, AIST
Abstract Number: 65 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract Particle size distribution measurement instruments based on electrical mobility classification can accurately measure particle size and number concentration of fine particles and are used for various applications. Performance evaluation methods for them, however, have not been established. For the scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS), the performance can be evaluated to some extent by individually inspecting and/or calibrating the components such as the charger, classifier, and detector. On the other hand, the fast-response instruments such as TSI’s fast mobility particle sizer (FMPS) are packaged so that the integrated components are not separable for individual testing. The same can be said for recent battery-powered portable instruments. For those instruments, techniques to evaluate the overall performance of a complete system as a whole are needed by treating each instrument as a “black box”. Such techniques would be also useful for testing the SMPS.
We propose a method that evaluates the overall performance of a size distribution measurement instrument based on checking the accuracy of the total number concentration using monodisperse particles. In this method, the total number concentration of monodisperse particles of the same aerosol is measured in parallel by a test instrument (e.g., SMPS) and a reference CPC. The total number concentration that is determined by integrating the size distribution density function measured by the test SMPS is compared with the number concentration measured by the reference CPC. Monodisperse particles are generated by passing particles from an electrospray aerosol generator through a neutralizer and subsequently classifying them with a differential mobility analyzer (DMA).Then, after mixed well with a dilution air, particles are delivered to the test SMPS and reference CPC simultaneously.
We will report the result of applying this method to commercial instruments such as TSI SMPS 3936L75.