Performance Evaluation of an Aerosol Collection Device for Bioaerosol Characterization

HUNTER HARDY, Kavindra Kumaragama, Suresh Dhaniyala, Clarkson University

     Abstract Number: 528
     Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods

Abstract
The growth in prevalence and diversity of low cost sensors has driven new measurement approaches and application areas. Such devices are predominantly being deployed to monitor ambient conditions. The emergence of these new sensors has necessitated new methodologies to quantify their performance. In our study, we evaluated a commercial low-cost electrostatic collector from TelosAir, for airborne biological microorganisms integrated with low-cost real-time aerosol sensors. We developed a well characterized experimental setup for this performance evaluation and established a robust approach to analyze the performance of the bio-collector unit. We established the size-dependent collection efficiency of the bio-collector and reported the performance of the unit in terms of its effective sample flow rate. The low-cost bio-collector is seen to have a near size-independent collection performance, with an effective sample flow rate of ~ 7-10 LPM, making it ideal for routine indoor sampling. We will present the collector design, the evaluation approach, and the experimental results from our testing.