Design and performance characteristics of a condensation particle counter UF-02proto

In this paper we present a design of a new swirling flow condensation particle counter UF-02proto, which has a continuous sampling flow. The performance and characteristics of the instrument were investigated. We studied experimentally the concentration range of the instrument and the detection efficiency as a function of particle diameter for silver particles. The lower cut-off size of the CPC, i.e. the limiting size when 50% of the particles are successfully accounted for, was determined to be 4.35–4.46 nm, depending slightly on a form of a fitted exponential step-function. The counting efficiency of the CPC at high particle concentrations was experimentally investigated using 20 nm silver particles. The maximum observable number concentration with a single particle counting method was approximately 100000 cm–3 with an accuracy of 20%. The operation of the CPC UF-02proto was also compared with that of a commercially available CPC when operating both instruments in parallel. The CPC proved to be suitable for a variety of applications with a wide range of particle concentrations and particle sizes.