Air sampler

Aim of this air sampler: capture airborne particules in Antarctica.

Principle

A DIY air pump blows ambient air through a 0.2 micron filter. All airborne particules that have a diameter larger than 0.2 micron will be trapped in the filter for further analysis.

First prototype

Air pump:

The pump works thanks to a motor that drives the oscillation of a membrane. For the first prototype we follow this video: https://youtu.be/xIWIu_49cno .

You will need:

A bottle cap
A balloon
Plastic tube
A motor (3V or more)
A lollipop stick or something like this
An engrenage
Some support for the pump, like a rectangular piece of wood
Stuff like scotch, wire, hot glue…

And then follow the steps from the video, it will give something like this:

Here we add some wire to connect the split lollipop stick to make the pump work with little amperage

Filter:

The filter use is a Whatman of 0.2 micron, that we link to the plastic tube of the air pump.

When we tried our pump we saw that some elements where not attached properly and that the glue was sometimes not enough. So we designed the parts in 3D and print them.

Second prototype

All STL files for the parts are disponible here : LIIIIIIIINK!

The cap:

Here is our final cap with the foam, the scotched balloon and the tube we designed: