2009 Volume 24 Issue 3 Pages 201-208
Community aerosol inlet is designed for the super sites of SKYNET ground monitoring network in accordance with the guideline proposed by World Meteorological Organization/Global Atmosphere Watch project. The basic structure of this GEOSS-SKYNET inlet consists of a vertical pipe installed through the roof of the laboratory so that air is brought from the inlet top (>4.5 m from the ground level) to the iso-kinetic air splitter attached at the bottom of pipe with minimal bending. Aerosols are pre-separated at the inlet top with PM10 impactor head which is newly designed for SKYNET super sites. The size separation characteristic of the inlet is tested with poly-dispersed fly-ash particles in a factory. The fly-ash particles collected on Nuclepore filters in the experiment were counted with Coulter counter method in 300 size bins. The obtained 50 % cut-off particle diameter of the inlet is 6.65 μm, which corresponds to 9.4 — 10.3 μm in aerodynamic diameter. Although the size separation characteristic of the inlet deviates from that of single-jet impactor with flat impaction plate in low Stokes Number region, it has better performance than commercially available PM10 inlets in the region of relatively small Stokes number.
