Electric wind in a Differential Mobility Analyzer

Journal Article · Sun Oct 25 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Boreal Environment Research

OSTI ID:1239782

Palo, Marus ^[1]; Uin, Janek ^[2]; Tamm, Eduard ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Tartu, Tartu (Estonia)
2. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)

Electric wind -- the movement of gas, induced by ions moving in an electric field -- can be a distorting factor in size distribution measurements using Differential Mobility Analyzers (DMAs). The aim of this study was to determine the conditions under which electric wind occurs in the locally-built VLDMA (Very Long Differential Mobility Analyzer) and TSI Long-DMA (3081) and to describe the associated distortion of the measured spectra. Electric wind proved to be promoted by the increase of electric field strength, aerosol layer thickness, particle number concentration and particle size. The measured size spectra revealed three types of distortion: widening of the size distribution, shift of the mode of the distribution to smaller diameters and smoothing out the peaks of the multiply charged particles. Electric wind may therefore be a source of severe distortion of the spectrum when measuring large particles at high concentrations.

• Research Organization: Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC00112704
• OSTI ID: 1239782
• Report Number(s): BNL-111646-2015-JA; R&D Project: 2016-BNL-EE630EECA-Budg; KP1701000
• Journal Information: Boreal Environment Research, Vol. 21, Issue 3-4; ISSN 1239-6095
• Publisher: Finnish Environment Institute
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES