Measurement and Monitoring Strategy for Assessing Workplace Exposure to Airborne Nanomaterials - Safety of Nanomaterials along Their Lifecycle - page 231

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Measurement and
Monitoring Strategy for
Assessing Workplace
Exposure to Airborne
Nanomaterials

Christof Asbach, Thomas A.J. Kuhlbusch,
Burkhard Stahlmecke, Heinz Kaminski,
Heinz J. Kiesling, Matthias Voetz, Dirk Dahmann,
Uwe Götz, Nico Dziurowitz, and Sabine Plitzko

CONTENTS
11.1 Background ................................................................................................... 233
11.2 The NanoGEM Tiered Approach ................................................................. 235
11.2.1 Tier 1 ................................................................................................. 235
11.2.2 Tier 2 ................................................................................................. 237
11.2.3 Tier 3 .................................................................................................240
11.3 Conclusions ................................................................................................... 243
Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. 243
References .............................................................................................................. 243

11.1 BACKGROUND
Representative exposure measurement, following dedicated measurement strategies,
is one of the foundations for epidemiological studies (Dahmann et al. 2008). Each
exposure assessment can only be used in an international context if harmonized and
accepted measurement strategies are applied. Although accepted protocols are avail-
able for assessing exposure to conventional materials, as of now, they are still lack-
ing for nanomaterials. Over the recent years, several studies have been published that
reported on exposure related measurements at nanotechnology workplaces (a review
of these studies can be found in Kuhlbusch et al. 2011). These studies used their own
measurement strategies, and most of them employed rather large sets of equipment,
including instruments for measuring particle size distributions, number and mass
concentrations, and samplers to collect particles for subsequent chemical and/or

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