A spectrometer for measuring particle size distributions in the range of 3 nm to 10 μm.

A spectrometer combining electrical mobility sizing and aerodynamic sizing was developed to measure aerosol size distributions in the range of 3 nm to 10 μm. It includes three instruments which cover different size ranges (a nano scanning mobility particle sizer (NSMPS, 3-60 nm), a regular scanning mobility particle sizer (RSMPS, 40-700 nm), and an aerodynamic particle sizer (APS, 550 nm-10 μm)). High voltage and sheath flow of the NSMPS and RSMPS were supplied using two home-built control boxes. A LabVIEW program was developed for spectrometer automatic operation. A linear inversion method was applied to correct particle multiple charging effects and to integrate data from the three instruments into a wide-range size distribution. Experiments were conducted to compare distributions in the overlap size ranges measured by three instruments. Good agreement between the NSMPS and RSMPS was achieved after correcting for the difference in counting efficiencies of the two particle counters. Aerodynamic size distributions reported by the APS were converted to mobility size distributions by applying an effective density method. Distributions measured by the RSMPS and APS were consistent in the overlap size range of 550-700 nm. A full spectrum in the size range of 3 nm to 10 μm was demonstrated by measuring aerosol generated using a mixture of different sized polystyrene latex spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]