Measurement of Fine/Ultrafine Dust Using Lenticular Fiber-Based Particulate Measurement Devices

Abstract

Measurement of particulate matter (PM), i.e., fine/ultrafine dust, is important for monitoring our surrounding environment. We demonstrate the fabrication of lenticular fiber-based fine/ultrafine dust measurement devices for monitoring the density and size of dust. The plano-convex lenticular fibers were fabricated by the CO2 laser polishing technique. The optical lens, used in the conventional light scattering-based fine/ultrafine dust measurement devices, was replaced by a plano-convex lenticular optical fiber to reduce the size and complexity of the dust measurement device. We utilized a light-emitting diode as the light source of the fine/ultrafine dust density measurement device. The fabricated device could indicate the dust density level (good, normal, bad, and very bad) according to the Korean standard. To estimate the size of the dust particulates, we fabricated a dust size measurement device that consists of a compact laser diode, a lenticular fiber, and a photodetector. We are successful in estimating the size of both fine and ultrafine PMs by detecting the power of the scattered light coming from the dust particulates. The dust size down to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.9 \mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> was detected using our dust measurement device. Our proposed dust measurement devices are simple, small, and cost-effective and can be considered as a candidate for portable applications.