2009 Volume 24 Issue 3 Pages 176-178
This article explains the light scattering aerosol spectrometer, which is one class of optical particle counters. Exposure level of workers to airborne nanoparticles in the working environment is sometimes evaluated investigated with a set of a condensation particle counter (CPC) and an optical particle counter (OPC). However, since many OPC are designed for measurements of low particle concentrations such as those in a clean room the counting of OPC is often saturated and does not provide accurate particle concentrations for the measurements of atmospheric or workplace aerosols measurements. A few OPCs can operate at high concentrations, and the aerosol spectrometer is one of them. In this article, the measurement principle and a typical instrument design are explained along with the contents of the new ISO standard 21501-1 for the aerosol spectrometer.
