Effect of Flow Field and Detection Volume in the Optical Particle Sensor on the Detection Efficiency

광학입자센서 내 유동장과 측정영역이 측정효율에 미치는 영향

The OPS (Optical Particle Sensor) using light scattering from the particles (real-time measurement without physical contact to the particles) can be used for cleanroom or atmospheric environment monitoring. For particles smaller than 300 nm, the detection efficiency becomes lower as scattered light decreases with particle size. To obtain higher detection efficiency with small particles, the flow field in particle chamber and the detection volume should be designed optimally to achieve maximum scattered light from the particles. In this study, a commercial computational fluid dynamics software FLUENT was used to simulate the gas flow field and particle trajectories with various optical chamber designs for 300 nm PSL particle. For estimation of laser viewing volume, we used a commercial computational optical design program ZEMAX. The results will be a great help in the development of OPS which can measure small particles with higher detection efficiency.