Development and laboratory evaluation of a compact swirling aerosol sampler (SAS) for collection of atmospheric bioaerosols

Abstract

Inhalation of infectious bioaerosols has been linked to a variety of respiratory diseases. However, efficient sampling techniques to allow high temporal resolution sampling are limited to collect and study bioaerosols in the various occupational and ambient micro-environmental atmospheres. This study introduces a medium flow swirling bioaerosol sampler (SAS) approach that collects atmospheric bioaerosols at the flow rate of 167 Lpm (10 cubic meter per hour). The collection of bioaerosols is achieved through a combination of impaction and cyclonic centrifugal motion. Aerosol deposition efficiency tests were performed with monodispersive polystyrene latex (PSL) particles ranging from 0.1 to 10 m. Results have shown that the sampler has cut-off size of 0.7 m and 1.5 m, with and without the assistance of added water vapor, respectively. The bioaerosol collection and viability tests were performed with comparison to the commercially-available BioSampler, and the results show that the collection efficiency of the SAS is 97% at the designed flow rate, while the higher flow of the new system yields more than 13 times of the collection rate compared to the BioSampler. The high collection efficiency and observed viability preservation of the SAS make it an attractive alternative for high time resolution bioaerosol sampling for atmospheric, occupational and indoor air quality monitoring.

Determination of performance-parameter design and impact factors of sampling efficiency for bioaerosol cyclones

“…Many previous studies used wet-lab experimental data to evaluate the cyclone performance based on these three ratios [17,20,[47][48][49][50]. In some experiments, inactive microorganism simulants, such as polystyrene latex (PSL), were applied to test the aerosol-to-hydrosol collection efficiencies of cyclones [15,51,52]. McFarland et al [32] defined the aerosol-to-hydrosol efficiency to be the intrinsic system of the WWC performance parameter with the detection of polystyrene latex spheres.…”

“…In addition, the cyclone performance evaluation with biological particles is a critical performance characterization. A previous study showed that the collection (aerosol-to-hydrosol) efficiency of a cyclonic swirling bioaerosol sampler for an aerosol cut-off size larger than 0.7 lm was 50%, and for that larger than 2 lm was 80% [52]. In another case, the sampling efficiency was tested for two new cyclone-based bioaerosol samplers.…”

Detection of bovine viral diarrhea virus genotype 1 in aerosol by a real time RT-PCR assay

“…In brief, the AGI-30 impinger was installed and placed on three tangential nozzles with the height of 1.5 m above the ground, and it was operated with 10 mL of phosphate buffer saline (PBS) injected into the Proton sampler (S. Figure 1). The airflow rate of filtration was 12.5 L/min for 30 min [50], and aerosol samples obtained at different locations in dairy herds were transferred into 15-mL centrifuge tubes in a cold box and transported to the laboratory. Primer design and synthesis A total of 69 sequences from different BVDV-1 lineages were obtained from NCBI GenBank database (http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) (S. Table 2) and aligned using the Clustal W program (MEGA 5.0 software).…”

An integrated system of air sampling and simultaneous enrichment for rapid biosensing of airborne coronavirus and influenza virus

“…Lab-designed air samplers have been developed for a higher enrichment capacity (EC). Wubulihairen et al (2015) introduced an ATH sampler that could apply an inertia impaction method where the EC was 835 for 100-nm particles. Hong et al (2016) studied an electrostatic particle concentrator (EPC) that could capture airborne viruses in a liquid volume of 0.5 mL; however, the EPC had a low EC of 8750 for a 100-nm airborne virus.…”