Assessment of Personal Direct-Reading Dust Monitors for the Measurement of Airborne Inhalable Dust

Abstract

The performances of five portable direct-reading dust monitors were investigated in a wind tunnel for a range of industrial dusts and three sizes of aluminium oxide test dust to mainly determine their suitability for measuring the inhalable fraction of airborne dust in workplaces. The instruments tested were Split 2 (SKC Ltd), Sidepak (TSI Inc.), Dataram (Thermo Electron Ltd), PDS-2 (Sibata Scientific Technology Ltd) and the Respicon TM (Hund Ltd). The instruments' responses were compared with reference dust samplers. These were the IOM sampler for the inhalable fraction and the Casella cyclone sampler for the respirable fraction. All instruments are predominantly responsive to and are designed to measure particles in the respirable size range, although two of the instruments, the Split 2 and Respicon TM, are claimed to be capable of measuring inhalable-sized particles. For the purpose of the tests, major modifications to an existing wind tunnel dust injection system were made to facilitate the generation of uniform concentrations of large inhalable-sized dust particles at low air velocities. Each monitor greatly underestimated the measurement of inhalable concentration for all the dusts tested, although the linearity was good over a wide range of concentrations for any particular size distribution of dust. However, their calibration factors, defined as the ratio of reference inhalable concentration to monitor concentration, were especially sensitive to changes in particle size as the response of the instruments decreased rapidly with increasing particle size. The monitors generally overestimated the measurement of respirable dust concentration by up to a factor of about 2, apart from the PDS-2, which underestimated it by a factor of up to 3. There was, however, a great deal more scatter in the reference respirable concentration measurements owing to the collection of small dust samples. Therefore, monitor linearity and effects of monitor response to changes in particle size could not be accurately investigated for the respirable fraction. The sampling head of the Split 2 monitor incorporates an IOM inlet and filter to gravimetrically collect the inhalable fraction of airborne dust. This can give a concurrent reference measure of inhalable airborne dust concentration. However, poor sealing within the sampling head resulted in some of the sampled dust not reaching the backup filter. This resulted in the Split 2 underestimating the reference inhalable dust concentration, which meant that it could not be accurately used as a calibration standard. Communications with the manufacturers have since revealed that the sampling head has recently been redesigned in order to improve the seal and eliminate leakage. The Respicon sampler gravimetrically underestimated the inhalable dust concentration, and did so increasingly as the particle size increased.