Measuring unhealthy particles in the atmosphere will soon become easier and less costly for environmental scientists, healthcare workers and technology manufacturers when aerosol manufacturer BMI debuts ACCESS 9400 next year, says company Vice President Fred Brechtel.
Announcing the new product suite at the American Association for Aerosol Research Conference in Minneapolis today, Brechtel says early trials are proving the product suite’s robust functionality, and he expects to be able to ship it next year.
Brechtel foresees ACCESS 9400 being used in conjunction with other aerosol measurement methodologies or as a standalone in many situations.
In addition to environmental testing, BMI sees the new product suite being valuable in the fast-emerging nanotechnology field as well as in cleanroom and silicone-wafer fabrication process monitoring.
“Tools to monitor worker exposure have not kept up with the accelerating use of highly engineered nanomaterials and nanoparticles in consumer goods,” says Brechtel, a Ph.D. atmospheric scientist with 17 years of particle sampling experience, who is in charge of the company’s product research.
Industries using nanoparticles in their products need tools to sample and verify nanoparticle properties during product manufacture to ensure high quality. BMI’s new product suite will satisfy nanoparticle industrial monitoring needs for diagnostic and worker exposure applications. The suite comprises a fully integrated set of instruments useful to industrial customers who need to understand their nanoparticle properties in real time.
The compact size and low weight means the system can be worn by an employee or contractor so that air samples can be easily obtained at any location along the fabrication line or inside cleanroom settings. The intensive measurements will allow more detailed analysis of particulate contaminants than would be possible with conventional techniques. The additional information will significantly decrease the time required to solve problems with contaminant sources by making it much easier to identify the source of problem particles.
The product suite comprises a fully-integrated set of four key instruments that fit in a shoebox-size volume. This development is a key step toward BMI’s vision to offer inexpensive technology solutions to customers who want to understand the quality of the air they breathe. The four-instrument suite weighs only 15 lbs. and includes:
an eight-channel filter sampler to collect particles for off-line chemical analysis
a particle counter to measure the total concentration of airborne particles
an absorption photometer to measure the amount of black carbon in the air and
an optical particle counter to measuring the concentration of particles as a function of their size.
The system will operate on batteries and use less than 50 watts of power. Product testing has demonstrated agreement within 10% between the new miniaturized particle counter and commercially available units over a broad particle size and concentration range.
