There is an increasing need for respirable crystalline silica (RCS) monitoring on mine sites to understand and limit exposure risks. To enable RCS monitoring in coal mines at the end of a shift, a method for direct-on-filter RCS analysis by Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) has been developed by NIOSH. It is for use with PVC filter samples collected using the standard Coal Mine Dust Personal Sampling Unit (CMDPSU). However, a method that can be applied to samples collected with the Continuous Personal Dust Monitor (CPDM) could be very valuable, since mines are now using the CPDM more frequently than the CMDPSU. While the CPDM sample cannot be analyzed directly, a 3-step method has been piloted to: (1) recover the dust from the CPDM’s filter, (2) deposit it onto a PVC filter, and (3) analyze it by FTIR to estimate RCS. In this presentation, we discuss the method in detail and show results for CPDM samples collected in both the lab and field. Moving forward, this method could enable mines to leverage the CPDM samples they are already collecting to collect additional RCS data.
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