Assessment on the Collection Efficiency of an Aerosol Sampler in Micro and Nanoparticles Environment

The collection efficiency (CE) of an aerosol sampler is usually assessed dependently by using a sampler with higher CE and higher sampling accuracy or comparing the grain size distribution, concentration and/or other characteristics of the collected dust to that of the original dust, instead of the sampler itself. To establish a simple method for the assessment on the collection efficiency (CE) of an aerosol sampler, a self-dependent method was derived to calculate the CE of an aerosol sampler, which was patented with the number of ZL200910233001.X by the State Intellectual Property Office of China. According to the patent method, two or more uniform aerosol samplers of the same model were connected in series the inlet of a sampler was connected directly with the outlet of another sampler. The CE (η) of the aerosol sampler can be calculated by a simple equation as: η=1-m2/m1, in which m1 and m2 is the weight of the aerosol particles collected by sampler 1# and sampler 2# in the connection sequence, respectively. A cascade impactor sampler was used to sample in a micrometer particle (d50=2.5 μm) aerosol environment and a nanoparticle (d50=42 nm) aerosol environment which were formed artificially in a glove box, as well as a workplace environment which manufactured nanometer powders. The sampling test results indicated that the cascade impactor sampler showed relative high CE (99.51%) for micrometer aerosol but a little bit low CE (95.2%) for nanoparticle aerosol. However, a low CE (93.93%) was calculated out by the method because of low concentration aerosol nanoparticles in the workplace environment, which result to big testing errors. It was found that the assessment result on collection efficiency of a sampler is highly affected by the subsequent analytical methods and detection accuracies after the sampling process. If the precision of the electronic balance was improved to a reasonable higher order of magnitude, the cascade impactor sampler can hopefully show much higher collection efficiency on nanoparticle aerosols.