Abstract
We present a humidity-controlled fast integrated mobility spectrometer (HFIMS) for rapid particle hygroscopicity measurements. The HFIMS consists of a differential mobility analyzer (DMA), a relative humidity (RH) control unit and a water-based FIMS (WFIMS) coupled in series. The WFIMS (Pinterich et al., 2017) combines the fast integrated mobility spectrometer (Kulkarni and Wang, 2006a, b) with laminar flow water condensation methodologies (Hering and Stolzenburg, 2005; Spielman et al., 2017). Inside the WFIMS, particles of different electrical mobilities are spatially separated in an electric field, condensationally enlarged and imaged to provide 1 Hz measurements of size distribution spanning a factor of ∼3 in particle diameter, which is sufficient to cover the entire range of growth factor (GF) for atmospheric aerosol particles at 90 % RH. By replacing the second DMA of a traditional hygroscopicity tandem DMA (HTDMA) system with the WFIMS, the HFIMS greatly increases the speed of particle growth factor measurement.
The performance of the HFIMS was evaluated using NaCl particles with well-known hygroscopic growth behavior and further through measurements of ambient aerosols. Results show that the HFIMS can reproduce, within 2 %, the literature values for hygroscopic growth of NaCl particles. NaCl deliquescence was observed between 76 and 77 % RH in agreement with the theoretical value of 76.5 % (Ming and Russell, 2001), and efflorescence relative humidity (43 %) was found to lie within the RH range of 41 to 56 % reported in the literature. Ambient data indicate that the HFIMS can measure the hygroscopic growth of five standard dry particle sizes ranging from 35 to 165 nm within less than 3 min, which makes it about 1 order of magnitude faster than traditional HTDMA systems.
Recommended Citation
T. Pinterich et al., "A Humidity-Controlled Fast Integrated Mobility Spectrometer (HFIMS) for Rapid Measurements of Particle Hygroscopic Growth," Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 4915 - 4925, Copernicus GmbH, Dec 2017.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-10-4915-2017
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Keywords and Phrases
Aerosol; Ambient air; Humidity; Hygroscopicity; Laminar flow; Measurement method; Particle size; Performance assessment; Size distribution; Spectrometer
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1867-1381; 1867-8548
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2017 The Author(s), All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
01 Dec 2017
Comments
This work was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Small Business Technology Grants DE-SC0006312 and DE-SC0013103.