A new scheme of periodic technical inspection (PTI) based on the measurement of particle number (PN) concentration has been introduced in Europe for diesel vehicle exhaust. To this end, tens of thousands of portable, cost-effective particle counters based on diffusion charging (DC) have been placed on the market. For simplicity, national legislation in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands allow the annual verification of these instruments to be performed with sodium chloride (NaCl) aerosols rather than soot; however, past studies have shown that the counting efficiency of DC-based counters depends on the properties of the test aerosol, such as particle size and morphology. In this study, we determined the counting efficiency of 7 different PN-PTI instruments with soot particles generated by a miniCAST 5301 BC combustion generator and salt particles generated by 4 different commercially available nebulizers and a miniature inverted soot generator. We determined correction factors for each PN-PTI instrument type to account for the difference in counting efficiency, which is comparable with the tolerance of 25% in counting efficiency defined in the Dutch and Belgian national legislations. Without this correction the annual verification may fail in case an aerosol different than soot is used. Finally, we compared the counting efficiency of various PN-PTI instruments when measuring combustion particles from two different diesel vehicle engines and soot from the miniCAST. In most cases, the agreement was very good, showing that soot from the miniCAST 5301 BC simulate adequately the properties of soot emitted by real diesel engines.
VASILATOU Konstantina;
KRAMER Nicola;
AUDERSET Kevin;
GURTNER Loïc;
KNOLL Marcus;
DE GOEDE Mark;
GIECHASKIEL Barouch;
GRIFFIG Max;
KUMAR Ashish;
CHAVDA Partik;
GROSSE Stephan;
GÖHLER Daniel;
HILLEMANN Lars;
LEE Winston;
MANN Robin;
PASIN Emiliano;
HUBEL Sebastian;
PETELET George;
SCHRIEFL Mario;
SCHWANZER Peter;
SEIFERT Philipp;
THOME Christian;
WILCE Ralph;
KOK Paul;
MELAS Anastasios;
2026-06-11
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
JRC146661
1879-1964 (online),
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021850226000959?via%3Dihub,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC146661,
10.1016/j.jaerosci.2026.106836 (online),
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