ChAMBRe: a new atmospheric simulation chamber for aerosol modelling and bio-aerosol research

International audienceAtmospheric simulation chambers are exploratory platforms used to study various atmospheric processes at realistic but controlled conditions. We describe here a new facility specifically designed for the research on atmospheric bio-aerosol as well as the protocols to produce, inject, expose and collect bio-aerosols. ChAMBRe (Chamber for Aerosol Modelling and Bio-aerosol Research) is installed at the Physics Department of the University of Genoa, Italy, and itis a node of the EUROCHAMP-2020 consortium. The cham-ber is made of stainless steel with a total volume of about2.2 m3. The lifetime of aerosol particle with dimension froma few hundreds of nanometres to a few microns varies fromabout 2 to 10 h. Characteristic parts of the facility are theequipment and the procedures to grow, inject, and extractbacterial strains in the chamber volume while preservingtheir viability. Bacteria are part of the atmospheric ecosys-tem and have impact on several levels as: health related is-sues, cloud formation, and geochemistry. ChAMBRe willhost experiments to study the bacterial viability vs. the airquality level, i.e. the atmospheric concentration of gaseousand aerosol pollutants. In this article, we report the results ofthe characterization tests as well as of the first experimentsperformed on two bacterial strains belonging to the Gram-positive and Gram-negative groups. A reproducibility at the 10 % level has been obtained in repeated injections and col-lection runs with a clean atmosphere, assessing this way thechamber sensitivity for systematic studies on bacterial via-bility vs. environmental conditions