Had great time kicking off #NAAMC in Pittsburgh with a personal tour of NIOSH lab where they do a ton of work on mine safety and respiratory dust protection. This apparatus is designed to create a clean air curtain around workers in high Quartz-content dust generation activities.
This is a $50K dust vacuum closet designed to remove dust from workers clothes to avoid clothing-derived dust exposure post-shift.
This is a full scale mock up of this insane typewriter-like machine that shaves away the mining walls while also holding the ceiling up to prevent it from collapsing.
This is a room built to emulate/show how little room there is to maneuver around this massive digger machine that is worming its way through the center of the earth.
Two of the most sophisticated dust sampling chambers in the world where MOD-PM will be put to the test in the coming month to see how well it can measure these particles. TEOMs and APS running as ref kit.
Live action shot of MODULAIR-PM doing some routine facility monitoring.
A super fascinating tour and eye opening experience for me. Hard to grasp the sheer scale and complexity of the work that NIOSH does to keep workers safe. Thanks to Emanuele Cauda for the invite! Look forward to returning for some epic dust chamber exps in the Fall.
old school
Also pretty neat to be at the facility where my Aura was actually certified. 😷
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As a kid/adolescent I decided early on that I wasn't going to drink. It just wasn't for me. Navigating the peer pressure gauntlet of high school and then college was an experience. That peer pressure 'feeling' had long since faded, until now...
Now..that strange pit of your stomach peer pressure real-feel has re-emerged, but not bc of alcohol. Now, I feel it every time I put on a mask to go inside some indoor/shit ventilation space. And my kids feel it too as they start school.
It's pretty F'd up that the district's only reassurance is that "they won't get in trouble for wearing their masks."
Phew.
A 4y old child shouldn't be made to feel ashamed for protecting themselves from inhaling shit that is unambiguously not good for them.
Ultimately 'story' + 'narrative' is what holds our attention. And narratives are rarely built from scientific facts or data or public health statistics. Instead, the narrative that persists
"..has a tendency to preserve the power of whoever's powerful." -Tamim Ansary
Thought provoking stuff esp. for a guy who's still learning that scientific facts (in the absence of story) don't get you very far when it comes to inspiring people to give a shit.
All desperately need narratives built from science, but we gotta bring our storytelling A-GAME to the fight if we're going to have any chance against these beasts.
Picking this thread back up! Digging into aerosol tau (whatever the fuck that means..)
Actually aerosol tau is a really HANDY number. It tells us how long it takes (in seconds, mins, or hours) for particles (suspended in the air) to leave a room.
First off - in the COVID (Hunger) Games LOW SCORE WINS when it comes to aerosol tau. TINY tau = Shorter timescale for those breath-derived (and pollution-derived) aerosols in the room to get to you.
Tiny tau = lower 🐟💩 inhalation dose.
Remember: Low. Score. Wins.
So how do we measure aerosol tau? Great question!
Step 1. Make some aerosols
Step 2. Measure the concentration of those aerosols
Step 3. Stop making aerosols
Step 4. Watch the concentration decay away
Step 5. Fit the data to an exponential decay curve and get tau!
Context - I have been making continuous CO2 & size-resolved aerosol measurements in this classroom since Sept. 10, 2021. For this indoor environment we have a strong handle on the day-to-day variability in gas and particle concentrations under normal mitigation/use conditions.
Normal 'air' operation for classroom includes an AustinAir HEPA on speed II in far corner of the room, mech HVAC overhead, box fan in doorway.
To understand whether Gus makes a difference we are assuming normal air operation has continued per usual over this past week. It has.
It would be GREAT if we could quantify the residence time of the aerosol particles between 0.5 and 5 um in all indoor, confined-air environments.
Why? Cause that's where heart of the breath-derived aerosol distribution resides.
But...
We should also appreciate the fact that resuspended dust from the movement of humans in those same indoor spaces will be THE dominant source of particles in the 0.5-5 um size range.