Our proposed instrument has applications in NASA's Airborne Science Program. It will be suitable for all the aircrafts used in this program, especially, unpiloted aircrafts like Global Hawk. According to NASA Webpage https://airbornescience.nasa.gov/instrument/aircraft/Global Hawk, multiple instruments are being used for atmospheric research on this unpiloted aircraft including aerosol spectrometers based on optical signals and condensation nuclei counting. Our proposed instrument will complement the existing suite of instruments with its unique capability of classifying particles by aerodynamic size and providing a true mass distribution. Further, it will save the size-classified aerosol samples for further analysis after the end of the flight mission.
Atmospheric research programs of non-NASA government agencies would also benefit from the proposed product. Some of these programs are (i) Atmospheric System Research Program, DOE, (ii) National Center for Atmospheric Research, sponsored by NSF, (iii) Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA, DOC. Similar programs exit worldwide. The proposed product will also be valuable for R&D work on aerosols in (i) indoor environments, (ii) occupational health and safety settings, (iii) powder processing, (iv) medical inhalers, (v) automotive exhaust, etc. Potential customers are academic, non-academic and industrial research laboratories. Our instrument would also be used in industrial manufacturing environment for routine monitoring of aerosol distribution and concentration in such applications as medical inhaler manufacturing. In some industrial applications, such as powder production (e.g. in pharmaceutical or food industry), it would be possible to use the output of our sensor to control the manufacturing processes automatically. Semiconductor structures and nanotechnology devices that are manufactured and assembled in clean rooms are becoming smaller and smaller. There is an emerging need for a contaminant particle measuring instrument for these applications, capable of measuring particles down to 10 nm in real-time. Our proposed instrument is well-poised for this application.
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