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Miniature Sensors for Airborne Particulate Matter
Citation:
Gould, B., L. Gundel, I. Paprotny, O. Mahdavipour, P. Solomon, AND R. White. Miniature Sensors for Airborne Particulate Matter. Engineers for a Sustainable World National Conference, Chicago, IL, April 11, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
Our group is working to design a small,lightweight, low-cost real-time particulate matter(PM) sensor to enable better monitoring of PMconcentrations in air, with the goal of informingpolicymakers and regulators to provide betterpublic health. The sensor reads the massconcentration of PM2.5, or particles smaller than2.5 μm in diameter, and includes a virtualimpactor (VI) to separate out particles largerthan 2.5 μm.Airborne particles enter the microfabricatedmicrofluidic channels, where the virtualimpactor separates particles by size. Athermophoretic heater causes deposition ofparticles onto a thin-film bulk acoustic resonator(FBAR), whose resonance frequency changeslinearly proportional to mass loading. Thechange in frequency is processed by amicrocontroller and sent to a receiver.