Aerosol Concentrator Employing Micro-Machined Aerodynamic Lenses

The proposed project will develop a novel aerosol concentrator based on aerodynamic lens technology capable of achieving very high concentration factors in a compact device. This device will be fabricated in silicon using micro-fabrication methods resulting in low cost, compact size, high reliability, high throughput, and extremely high precision and repeatability. In this project we will develop Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) models of the fluid flow and particle trajectories inside aerodynamic lenses. We will fabricate lenses on silicon wafers using standard wafer micro-fabrication methods, and we will test the performance of those lenses using carefully prepared aerosols. Finally, we will make detailed comparisons between the predictions of our CFD models and the experimental results. At the end of phase I, we will have developed a reliable CFD modeling capability that can be used in phase II to design more complex structures and we will have demonstrated the feasibility of fabricating these lenses in silicon using standard micro-machining techniques. We will also have developed a battery of diagnostic methods to assess the performance of these devices which will be used in phase II to assess the performance of 2-dimensional arrays of aerodynamic lens aerosol concentrators.