Determination of arbitrary moments of aerosol size distributions from measurements with a differential mobility analyzer

Abstract

A method to determine arbitrary moments of aerosol size distributions from differential mobility analyzer measurements has been proposed. The proposed method is based on a modification of the algorithm developed by Knutson and Whitby to calculate the moments of electrical mobility distributions. For this modification, the electrical mobility and the charge distribution have been approximately expressed by power functions of the particle diameter. To evaluate the validity of the approximation, we have carried out numerical simulations for typical size distributions. We have found that for typical narrowly distributed aerosols such as polystyrene latex particles and particles that arise in the tandem differential mobility analyzer configuration, the distribution parameters can be accurately determined by this method. For a log-normally distributed aerosol, the accuracy of the distribution parameters determined by this method has been evaluated as a function of the geometric standard deviation. We have also compared the accuracy of the proposed method with other existing methods in the case of the asymmetric Gaussian distribution.