A Microscope-Based Particle Counting System for Determining Collected Aerosol Mass During the Calibration of a Cascade Impactor

It is shown that a simple optical particle-counting system can be efficiently and accurately used for determining the mass of collected particles during the calibration of a cascade impactor. For particles larger than 1 mu m in diameter, the limit of detection was enhanced by a factor 5 compared to the traditional spectrophotometer-based method.