Development of a new portable air sampler based on electrostatic precipitation

Abstract

Airborne particles are known to cause illness and to influence meteorological phenomena. It is therefore important to monitor their concentrations and to identify them. A challenge is to collect micro and nanoparticles, microorganisms as well as toxic molecules with a device as simple and small as possible to be used easily and everywhere. Electrostatic precipitation is an efficient method to collect all kinds of airborne particles. Furthermore, this method can be miniaturized. A portable, silent, and autonomous air sampler based on this technology is therefore being developed with the final objective to collect very efficiently airborne pathogens such as supermicron bacteria but also submicron viruses. Particles are collected on a dry surface so they may be concentrated afterwards in a small amount of liquid medium to be analyzed. It is shown that nearly 98 % of airborne particles from 10 nm to 3 μm are collected.

Design and development of a self-contained personal electrostatic bioaerosol sampler (PEBS) with a wire-to-wire charger

“…Several new personal bioaerosol sampler concepts, such as rotating cup (Gorner et al 2006) and microcentrifuge tube (Lindsley et al 2006;Macher et al 2008;Su et al 2012) have been proposed. In addition to samplers based on inertia and filtration, several electrostatics-based bioaerosol samplers, including those designed for area and even personal sampling, have been developed and applied (Mainelis et al 1999(Mainelis et al , 2002a(Mainelis et al , 2002bYao and Mainelis 2006;Han and Mainelis 2008;Madsen and Sharma 2008;Tan et al 2011;Park et al 2015;Roux et al 2016). Compared to inertial sampling techniques, electrostatic samplers have a number of advantages: lower power requirements, lower pressure drop, and lower impaction stress on the organisms (Mainelis et al 1999;Tan et al 2011).…”

Hydrated negative air ions generated by air–water collision with TiO2 photocatalytic materials

“…Negative air ions (NAIs) are very important natural components of atmospheric air, which have attracted considerable attention due to their potential health benets. [1][2][3] In recent years, NAIs have been widely used in air cleaning, 4,5 such as aerosol particle removal, 6 including airborne microorganisms, 7,8 and volatile organic compound degradation. 9 Based on these advantages, numerous household commercial electric appliances are equipped with NAI generating modules as a propaganda gimmick.…”

Atmospheric Biodetection Part I: Study of Airborne Bacterial Concentrations from January 2018 to May 2020 at Saclay, France

“…In this context, different approaches have been used in the literature to collect and analyze the bacterial concentrations in the air based on filtration, wet collectors, or electrostatic precipitation [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. Recently, in order to investigate the hourly variability of PBAPs, online measurements by fluorescence methods have been developed and used in different environments [ 35 , 36 ].…”