PNNL

Abstract

Experiments have shown that ions can substantially increase vapor-to-liquid nucleation rates. However, interpretation of these experiments is complicated by ambiguities arising from the manner in which the ions are produced. Several studies have concluded that water has a general preference for anions over cations. We show that specification of ion’s sign alone is insufficient to provide an understanding of the aqueous ionic cluster thermodynamics and that Classical Ion-Induced Nucleation Theory does not treat the cluster physics properly to describe ion-induced nucleation accurately.