Abstract
In this study, we carried out experiments to study penetration of airborne carbon nanotubes (CNTs) through a screen filter. An electrospray system was employed to aerosolize suspensions of multi-wall CNTs. The generated airborne CNTs were characterized by electron microscopy, and the length and diameter were measured. In the filtration experiments, the challenging CNTs are classified by a differential mobility analyzer. Monodisperse CNTs with the same electrical mobility were then employed to challenge the screen filter. Penetration was measured for CNTs in the range of 100-400 nm mobility diameters. The results showed that the CNT penetration was less than the penetration for a sphere with the same mobility diameter, which was mainly due to the larger interception length of the CNTs. We compared the modeling results using single-fiber filtration efficiency theories with the experimental data, and found that the effective interception length can be approximated by the CNT aerodynamic diameter multiplying a scaling factor. A hypothesis is proposed to understand the observation.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 4565-4573 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Nanoparticle Research |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2011 |
Keywords
- Control technology
- Emission controls
- Environmental and health implications
- Filtration
- Pollution control equipment