Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2004

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

Warren R. Myers.

Abstract

Accurate performance of personal aerosol samplers is critical for industrial hygienists' successful efforts to protect workers. Performance assessments of personal samplers are necessarily conducted in controlled environments so unknown sources of variability will not influence the results. This is done in order that samplers may be used with confidence for monitoring workplace air quality. These performance evaluations are usually conducted in wind tunnels. However, recent advances in high-performance cluster computing---together with advanced flow modeling software---have made it possible to evaluate sampler performance with computer simulations. This was done in the current research. Simulations were conducted for air and particle behavior near the inlet of the GSP and IOM Inhalable aerosol samplers using a pre-verified commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package. Steady-state, 3-D simulations were conducted using the FLUENT CFD solver with renormalized group (RNG) theory applied to a k-&egr; turbulence model. Particle trajectories were calculated in a Lagrangian reference frame on the resulting velocity fields. Based on the particle trajectories, sampling efficiencies were calculated and were compared to those reported in the literature. They were found to have similar overall trends for particle sizes up to 40 mum. Using a correction factor, agreement was observed to be reasonable for most cases. It was concluded that CFD can be used to evaluate the performance of personal samplers.

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