Laboratory evaluation of the effects of particle size and composition on the performance of integrated devices containing Plantower particle sensors

Abstract

Particle size and particle composition are two important variables that potentially affect the performance of low-cost sensors that quantify airborne particle concentrations. In order to investigate how these sensors respond to particles of varying size and composition, we conducted controlled laboratory experiments studying the Plantower PMS5003 sensor and four integrated devices containing Plantower sensors. We challenged the sensors with five particle sources, and for a subset of these sources, we conducted experiments with monodisperse particles ranging between 100 nm and 700 nm. Our results suggest that different sources affect the sensors’ accuracy in their reported particle mass concentration, and this effect on the sensors’ performances appears to be driven by particle size more than composition. During our size-selected experiments, the sensors could detect particles as small as 100 nm, but the both the slopes and R2 values for linear regressions between the sensors and our reference instruments remained below roughly 0.5 until the particle diameter increased to 300 nm. Finally, we demonstrate the sensors cannot apportion the total particle mass concentration into different size fractions on a consistent and accurate basis, which corroborates prior work.