University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Windisch, Switzerland.
Inhal Toxicol. 2009 Jul;21 Suppl 1:30-4. doi: 10.1080/08958370902942632.
There are several good reasons to use personal monitors for exposure control and health effect studies. But current personal monitoring methods are either not sensitive enough to measure typical ambient concentrations, work offline (masking short exposures to high concentrations), and/or require trained personnel to analyze the data, which makes them difficult to use. For this reason, we propose the use of a diffusion charging sensor as an online personal monitoring method, and present a miniaturized device (45 x 80 x 200 mm, 770 g) that works on this principle. Our device has a high time resolution and covers typically encountered ambient concentration ranges. It can measure very low particle concentrations of a few hundred particles per cubic centimeter even for ultrafine particles (i.e., two to three orders of magnitude more sensitive than rival technologies), while the upper detection limit is 1 million particles/cm(3), which hardly ever occurs in ambient settings. While other methods measure a fixed quantity, the response of our device can be tuned to be proportional to the particle diameter to the power of x, with at least 0.3 <or= x <or= 1.35. This opens up the possibility of giving more weight to smaller particles, which is a key feature, since on a per-mass basis, smaller solid particles have been shown to be more toxic than larger ones.
使用个人监测器进行暴露控制和健康影响研究有几个很好的理由。但是，目前的个人监测方法要么不够敏感，无法测量典型的环境浓度，要么离线工作（掩盖了对高浓度的短时间暴露），并且/或者需要经过培训的人员来分析数据，这使得它们难以使用。出于这个原因，我们建议使用扩散充电传感器作为在线个人监测方法，并提出了一种基于此原理的小型化设备（45 x 80 x 200 毫米，770 克）。我们的设备具有高时间分辨率，并涵盖了通常遇到的环境浓度范围。它可以测量非常低的颗粒浓度，每立方厘米几百个颗粒，即使是超细颗粒（即比竞争对手的技术敏感两个到三个数量级），而检测上限为 100 万个颗粒/立方厘米，这在环境设置中几乎从未发生过。虽然其他方法测量固定数量，但我们设备的响应可以调整为与颗粒直径的 x 次幂成正比，其中至少 0.3 <or= x <or= 1.35。这为赋予更小的颗粒更多权重提供了可能性，这是一个关键特征，因为就质量基础而言，已经表明较小的固体颗粒比较大的颗粒毒性更大。
