Collection efficiency of airborne fibers on nylon mesh screens with different pore sizes and configurations

Aerodynamic behavior of airborne fibers including high-aspect ratio particles plays an important role in aerosol filtration and lung deposition. Fiber length is considered to be an important parameter in causing toxicological responses of elongate mineral particles, including asbestos, as well as one of the factors affecting lung deposition. In order to estimate the toxicity of fibers as a function of fiber length, it is required to separate fibers by length and understand mechanisms related to fiber separation for use in toxicology studies. In this study, we used nylon mesh screens with different pore sizes as a separation method to remove long fibers and measured screen collection efficiency of glass fibers (a surrogate for asbestos) as a function of aerodynamic diameter with the aim to prepare toxicology samples free of long fibers and/or harvest long fibers from the screen. Two screen configurations ([i] without a laminar flow entrance length, and [ii] with the entrance length) were tested to investigate the effect of screen pore size (10, 20, and 60 µm) and screen configuration on collection efficiency of fibers. Screen collection efficiency (η) was obtained based on measurements of downstream concentrations of a test chamber either without or with a screen. The results showed that screen collection efficiency increases as screen pore size decreases from 60 to 10 µm for both cases with and without entrance lengths. For the screen configuration without entrance length, higher collection efficiency was obtained than the case with entrance length probably due to increased impaction caused by the close proximity of inlet to screen. In addition, the difference between the collection efficiencies for the different configurations was small in the aerodynamic size range below 3 µm while it increased in the size range from 3 to about 7 µm, indicating that as large aerodynamic diameter is associated with longer fibers, some differential selection of fibers is possible. Modified model collection efficiency for 10 and 20 µm screens based on the interception predicts well the measured data for the case with entrance length, indicating that the fiber deposition on these screens occurs dominantly through the interception mechanism in the micrometer size range under a given flow condition.