Development of an Ultrasonic Nebulizer Using a Domestic Humidifier

摘要

An inexpensive ultrasonic nebulizer (USN) was developed utilizing a home humidifier. The ultrasonic transducer was taken from a commercial USN and the power supply was from a humidifier. Sample was continuously fed into the nebulizer and the detection limit was improved 3-20 times over a pneumatic nebulizer. Undesirably, noise in signal was also increased several times. 0.5 ppm of Mn was used as an internal reference and the "long-term" drift could be successfully corrected. Since the noise contained high and low frequency components, both could be effectively removed only by the real-time correction method such as the Myer-Tracy method, where the reference line was simultaneously monitored with the analytical lines. The performance of USN was tested with NIST SRMs and showed good agreement with the certified values.