A Computer-Based Air Flow Control System for Aerosol and Filtration Research

摘要

An airflow control system is one of important parts in the scanning mobility particle sizer system (SMPS) used in the fields of aerosol and air filtration. In this paper, the air flow control system that consists of an air filter, a blower, an air flow sensor, a controller, and a computer are reported. A flow rate adjustment was performed by varying the rotation speed of the blower using a pulse width modulation (PWM) technique. An air flow sensor capable of measuring flow rate up to 20 liters/min was used to measure the air flow rate. In order to keep at a certain value of the flow rate, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control action was employed in which PID controller was manually tuned. The results showed that the desired value of flow rate was quickly achieved with insignificant overshoot.