A Computer-Based Air Flow Control System for Aerosol and Filtration Research

Abstract

An airflow control system is one of important parts in the scanning mobility particle sizers system (SMPS) used in the field of aerosol and air filtration. In this paper, the air flow control system that consists of an air filter, a blower, an air flow sensor, a controller, and a computer are reported. A flow rate adjustment was performed by varying the rotation speed of the blower using a pulse width modulation (PWM) technique. The air flow sensor capable of measuring flow rate up to 20 liters / min was used to measure the air flow rate. In order to keep at a certain value of the flow rate, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control action was employed in which PID controller were manually tune. The results showed that the desired value of flow rate was quickly achieved with little overshoot was observed in the system output.