Air microfluidic chip design for atmospheric particulate matter detection

Abstract

In recent years, studies on fine particulate matter have shown that high concentrations of particulate matter seriously affect the quality of weather, creating a series of severe weather such as haze and posing a great risk to human health. The results of epidemiological studies suggest that particulate matter is associated with a higher risk of cardiopulmonary mortality and morbidity. Therefore, there is an urgent need to conduct research on particulate matter to solve the human health problems caused by particulate matter pollution. The identification of the compositional characteristics of particulate matter presupposes the separation of particulate matter with different aerodynamic diameters and provides scientific guidance for solving the problem of atmospheric particulate matter pollution. To address this problem, a virtual impactor with a cutting particle size of 1.2 μm is designed in this paper. The influence of key parameters on the performance of the virtual impactor is also discussed. The results show that the proposed virtual impactor has a cutting particle size of 1.2um and a good steepness of the collection efficiency curve. It shows that it can effectively separate atmospheric particulate matter according to particle size and provides a design basis for realizing a low-cost atmospheric particulate matter mass concentration detection instrument. Meanwhile, we design a microfluidic chip for particulate matter detection based on this virtual impactor. The hardware circuit of this microfluidic chip is also designed.