Separation and electrochemical detection platform for portable individual PM2.5 monitoring

Airborne particulate matter (PM) pollution, especially fine particles with a diameter of 2.5 μm or smaller (PM2.5), has caused severe air quality issues that threaten human life and contribute to global mortality. Thus a low cost, portable or wearable platform for individual PM2.5 monitoring is of great interest. This paper introduces a platform for portable real-time PM2.5 monitoring that combines a particle separation microfluidic channel and electrochemical detection. The microfluidic device utilizes an I-shape pillar based deterministic lateral displacement method to achieve high separation efficiency of different particle sizes. Electrochemical detection was implemented for particles measurement to achieve high sensitivity and simplify the instrumentation compared to conventional optical methods. Both separation and detection results show that this platform is a promising option for portable PM2.5 monitoring.

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