SBIR Phase I: Innovative Aerosol Collector for On-Line Analysis of Organics

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to adressss the critical need for improved measurements of individual organic compounds in aerosol particles. Aerosols are crucially important due to their effects in global climate and human health, as well to industrial applications such as pharmaceutical drug delivery. This project seeks to develop a new Aerosol Collector Module (ACM) that will allow the accumulation of sufficient aerosol mass in an artifact-free manner for analysis of aerosol composition in near real-time with high- time resolution (< 30 min.) by a variety of analytical instruments. The ACM will use the techniques implemented by Aerodyne in its highly successful Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) to separate the aerosols from the gas phase. The ACM will consist of: 1) A new cryocollector 2) An interface module to thermally desorb the collected aerosol 3) A flow control. The commercial market for the ACM will include government, academic, and industrial research laboratories and may expand to include regulatory monitoring efforts and process industrial laboratories. The ACM will allow for the first time near real- time analysis of individual organic species present on aerosols and will be marketed at a significantly lower cost than existing analytical methods. The ability to measure aerosol size-resolved organic composition is needed for understanding and mitigating the climate impacts and health effects of particulate matter, and for the characterization and improvement of industrial aerosol technologies.