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Validation of continuous particle monitors for personal, indoor, and outdoor exposures
Citation
Wallace, LA and Wheeler, AJ and Kearney, J and Van Ryswyk, K and You, H and Kulka, RH and Rasmussen, PE and Brook, JR and Xu, X, Validation of continuous particle monitors for personal, indoor, and outdoor exposures, Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, 21 pp. 49-64. ISSN 1559-0631 (2011) [Refereed Article]
Copyright Statement
Copyright 2011 Nature America, Inc.
Abstract
Continuous monitors can be used to supplement traditional filter-based methods of determining personal exposure to air pollutants. They have the
advantages of being able to identify nearby sources and detect temporal changes on a time scale of a few minutes. The Windsor Ontario Exposure
Assessment Study (WOEAS) adopted an approach of using multiple continuous monitors to measure indoor, outdoor (near-residential) and personal
exposures to PM2.5, ultrafine particles and black carbon. About 48 adults and households were sampled for five consecutive 24-h periods in summer and
winter 2005, and another 48 asthmatic children for five consecutive 24-h periods in summer and winter 2006. This article addresses the laboratory and
field validation of these continuous monitors. A companion article (Wheeler et al., 2010) provides similar analyses for the 24-h integrated methods, as well
as providing an overview of the objectives and study design. The four continuous monitors were the DustTrak (Model 8520, TSI,
St. Paul, MN, USA) and personal DataRAM (pDR) (ThermoScientific, Waltham, MA, USA) for PM2.5; the P-Trak (Model 8525, TSI) for ultrafine
particles; and the Aethalometer (AE-42, Magee Scientific, Berkeley, CA, USA) for black carbon (BC). All monitors were tested in multiple co-location
studies involving as many as 16 monitors of a given type to determine their limits of detection as well as bias and precision. The effect of concentration and
electronic drift on bias and precision were determined from both the collocated studies and the full field study. The effect of rapid changes in
environmental conditions on switching an instrument from indoor to outdoor sampling was also studied. The use of multiple instruments for outdoor
sampling was valuable in identifying occasional poor performance by one instrument and in better determining local contributions to the spatial variation
of particulate pollution. Both the DustTrak and pDR were shown to be in reasonable agreement (R2 of 90 and 70%, respectively) with the gravimetric
PM2.5 method. Both instruments had limits of detection of about 5 mg/m3
. The DustTrak and pDR had multiplicative biases of about 2.5 and 1.6,
respectively, compared with the gravimetric samplers. However, their average bias-corrected precisions were o10%, indicating that a proper correction
for bias would bring them into very good agreement with standard methods. Although no standard methods exist to establish the bias of the
Aethalometer and P-Trak, the precision was within 20% for the Aethalometer and within 10% for the P-Trak. These findings suggest that all four
instruments can supply useful information in environmental studies
Item Details
Item Type: | Refereed Article |
---|---|
Keywords: | personal exposure, particulate matter, inhalation exposure, environmental monitoring |
Research Division: | Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services |
Research Group: | Human resources and industrial relations |
Research Field: | Occupational and workplace health and safety |
Objective Division: | Health |
Objective Group: | Public health (excl. specific population health) |
Objective Field: | Public health (excl. specific population health) not elsewhere classified |
UTAS Author: | Wheeler, AJ (Dr Amanda Wheeler) |
ID Code: | 101113 |
Year Published: | 2011 |
Web of Science® Times Cited: | 135 |
Deposited By: | Menzies Institute for Medical Research |
Deposited On: | 2015-06-10 |
Last Modified: | 2017-11-03 |
Downloads: | 0 |
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