Laboratory and field testing of a calibration tool (caltool) for evaluating personal aerosol samplers performances

摘要

The conventional methods of testing the sampling performances of personal inhalable aerosol samplers utilize laboratory-based facilities and experimental protocols rather complex that also idealize the conditions to which the samplers are exposed (uniform airflow and aerosol concentration).However,in many work tasks and practices,the air environment is not uniform and the worker often operates being in a close vicinity of a aerosol point source.This suggest that performance testing should be performed for any personal aerosol sampler in the actual workplaces where the environmental conditions are not controlled.For this task,as part of an European Project,a novel calibration tool has been designed and developed.This instrument (CALTOOL) is thought to provide the standard against which a candidate personal aerosol sampler is compared and finally calibrated.CALTOOL is based on a simplification of the shape of the human body with the reference concentration to be determined by sampling through the mouth of the simplified head at a constant flow rate of 20 L/min.CALTOOL has been partially evaluated through laboratory experiments (Mark et al.,2000).The objectives of the study was to pursue the laboratory testing of CALTOOL and to carry out field tests in actual workplaces.