Dustiness of 14 carbon nanotubes using the vortex shaker method

Abstract

The handling of carbon nanotube (CNT) powders is a plausible scenario during the course of the CNT life-cycle. However, related exposure data remain limited. In this context, information about the dustiness of CNT is therefore of great interest, for example for control banding or exposure modelling. Here, we investigate the dustiness of fourteen CNT powders using the Vortex Shaker (VS) method. The central component of the VS method is a stainless steel cylindrical tube, continuously shaken in a circular orbital motion, in which a small volume (0.5 cm3) of the powder to be tested is placed. All samples were obtained through the NANoREG Nanomaterials Information and Web-Order system. The test procedure that we have developed is based on four principal components: (i) a respirable cyclone for gravimetric sampling, (ii) a CPC as a reference instrument for number concentration measurement, (iii) an MPS for collection of particles for EM observations/analysis, and (iv) an ELPI for size-resolved aerosol measurement. In this paper, the data were evaluated using two parameters: (i) the mass-based dustiness index in the respirable fraction; and (ii) the number-based dustiness index in the respirable fraction. The results indicate that the method leads to relatively accurate mass- and number-based dustiness indices. The indices obtained span wide ranges, of 2 and 3 orders of magnitude variation for mass and number respectively, suggesting a corresponding significant difference in terms of potential exposure. EM observations reveal that airborne CNTs are mostly released as bundles of different shapes ranging from a few tens of nanometers up to tens of micrometers in size.