PNNL

Abstract

With the advert of aerosol instrumentation it has become possible to simultaneously measure individual particle mobility and vacuum aerodynamic diameters. For spherical particles these two diameters yield individual particle density. In contrast, assigning a physical meaning to the mobility or aerodynamic diameter of aspherical particles is not straightforward. This paper presents an experimental exploration of the effect of particle shape on the relationship between mobility and vacuum aerodynamic diameters. We make measurements on systems of three types: 1) Agglomerates of spheres, for which the density and the volume are known; 2) Ammonium sulfate, sodium chloride, succinic acid and lauric acid irregularly shaped particles of known density; and 3) Internally mixed particles, containing organics and ammonium sulfate, of unknown density and shape. For agglomerates of spheres we observed alignment effects in the DMA and report the first measurements of the dynamic shape factors (DSFs) in free molecular regime. We present here the first experimental determination of the DSF of ammonium sulfate particles. We find for ammonium sulfate particles a DSF that increases from 1.03 to 1.07 as particle mobility diameter increases from 160 nm to 500 nm. Three types of NaC1 particles were generated and characterized: nearly spherical particles with DSF of ~1.02; cubic with DSF that increases from 1.065 to 1.17 as particle mobility diameter increases from 200 nm to 900 nm; and compact agglomerates with DSF 1.3-1.4. Organic particles were found very nearly spherical. The data suggest that particles composed of binary mixtures of ammonium sulfate and succinic acid have lower dynamic shape factors than pure ammonium sulfate particles. However, for internally mixed ammonium sulfate and lauric acid particles we cannot distinguish between nearly spherical particles with low density and particles with DSF of 1.17.