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ABSTRACT
A new unipolar charger of aerosol particle has been designed and evaluated. The free ion and particle trajectories have been simulated. Four parameters, including electrical characteristics, particle loss, charging efficiency and the average charges, were varied to evaluate the charger. The experimental results show that the average discharge current was stable at 5 µA with 2.6 kV applied on the needle. The standard deviation is 0.0016 when clean air is entered in the discharging zone, as compared to the deviation of 0.024 with unfiltered ambient air which indicates that discharge current is more stable when clean air is entered. The electrostatic loss, diffusion loss and total particle loss were below about 4, 7 and 9% for all particles (sizes of 20–1000 nm), respectively. The intrinsic and extrinsic charging efficiency increased with the particle diameter. The intrinsic efficiency is practically 100% for particle diameters above 50 nm. Compared to the intrinsic efficiency, the extrinsic charging efficiency decreased by 5% given the fact that some of particles may be deposited inside the charger. As for the average particle charge number, the maximum relative error between the results of experiment and theory was less than 15%.