THE REDUCTION OF DUST LOSSES WITHIN THE CASSETTE OF THE SIMPEDS PERSONAL DUST SAMPLER *

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Abstract
The SIMPEDS personal dust sampler is a small cyclone sampler used extensively to collect the airborne respirable fraction of dust in workplace environments. It was found that deposition of dust on the walls of the filter/cassette system originally used with this sampler could introduce potential error into the direct-on-filter compositional analysis of dust. After due recognition of electrostatic forces and by using a photographic technique to establish the airflow patterns, a new cassette has been designed to minimize wall loss. The distribution of the mass and the particle size of dust across a filter from a SIMPEDS sampler using the new design of cassette has been measured and found to be uneven. The effect that an uneven dust deposit has on the direct analysis for specific substances by infra-red spectroscopy, a technique known to be particle-size dependent, can be minimized, provided reference samples are prepared by a similar method to field samples.

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