Aerosol particle collection efficiency of holey carbon film-coated TEM grids

Abstract

A simple sampling method to collect aerosol particles for transmission electron microscope (TEM) analysis was developed by Rmili and others in 2013. The method involves passing air through a holey carbon film-coated copper mesh TEM grid (holey carbon grid) and sampling particles by filtration. In this study, we proposed a modified calculation method to represent the collection efficiencies of holey carbon grids, taking into consideration the porosity of the copper mesh. We then evaluated the particle collection efficiencies of holey carbon grids both theoretically and experimentally. We tested the collection efficiency of two types of holey carbon grids, with nominal pore sizes of 1.2 and 0.6 m, using particles of monodispersed polystyrene latex (PSL) and potassium chloride. The overall collection efficiency of each grid (Egrid) was determined by the downstream/upstream concentration ratio measured by condensation particle counters (CPCs). In addition, for PSL particles, the collection efficiency of the holey carbon film (Efilm) was determined by the ratio of the number of particles on the film (counted on a scanning electron microscope) to the number of inflow particles (counted by a CPC). We compared model calculations against the experimental results obtained in this study and those reported by Rmili and others in 2013. These data showed that the calculated Egrid values were in reasonably good agreement with the experimental Egrid values. However, although the model calculation indicated that Efilm ≈ Egrid, there was an inconsistency between the experimental Efilm and Egrid, which requires further investigation in order to determine its cause. © 2014 American Association for Aerosol Research.