An experimental study of aerosol particles using PCASP-X2 and WPS™

PCASP-X2 is a ground-base aerosols instrument with high time resolution reach up to 1s, a short-term observation for testing its performance of detecting the number concentration of aerosol particles with another instrument WPS™ was carried out in November 2009 in Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST). The data were analyzed by using the meteorological parameters which were obtained simultaneously by an automatic weather station in NUIST. In this work, we took the WPS™ as the standard equipment. The results show that the two instruments give a similar diurnal variation of aerosol number concentration, and that the number concentrations measured by the two instruments correlated well, especially for fine particles. Moreover, the number concentration measured by PCASP-X2 was less than that by WPS™, which presented a factor about 0.6 in particle size ranging of 0.10μm~0.10μm. It is also found that the number concentration of aerosol particles is closely correlated with meteorological parameters such as relative humidity, temperature and visibility. However, there is still a lot of work to be done here for testing the measurement stability in a longtime period of this instrument.