Study of semi-volatile liquid aerosol evaporation collected on fibrous media

This study falls within the scope of improving knowledge concerning evaporation of semi-volatile liquid aerosols collected on fibrous filters. Under these conditions, the aerosol evaporation phenomenon causes problems of safety, in particular over-exposure of employees to vapours downstream of general air filtering systems. Furthermore, when controlling aerosol atmospheric concentrations, evaporation results in under-estimation of the sampled aerosol particle phase and this is clearly problematic in exposure prevention terms.
The aim of this work was therefore to record a large number of experimental data, both to make up for their scarcity in the literature and to improve previously developed theoretical models.
Two experimental approaches were implemented to identify the evaporation process for a collected aerosol. The first, termed the global approach, allowed us to monitor aerosol evaporation by measuring vapour quantity downstream of the filter with respect to time. The second, microscopic approach, considers evaporation of droplets collected on the filter fibres on a microscopic scale.
The two approaches implemented during this research lead to agreement on the fact that evaporation of a liquid semi-volatile aerosol cannot be satisfactorily represented by the theoretical models proposed in the literature. Hypotheses are advanced to explain the divergence in evaporation kinetics between theoretical and experimental work.