Hydration Properties of Combustion Aerosols

Abstract

There has been considerable recent interest in the hydration properties of combustion aerosols. Both their warm cloud condensation behavior and ice-nucleating ability have important atmospheric implications. At the University of Missouri-Rolla we have a substantial cloud simulation facility designed for the laboratory study of atmospheric processes under realistic conditions (i.e., temperature, pressure, and supersaturation) and time scales. A combustion aerosol capability has been added to this facility. We can generate a variety of combustion aerosols, under controlled and observed conditions, characterize and shape (modify their size distribution) these aerosols, and then examine their hydration behavior under either warm or cold conditions. Here we describe this combustion system and present results (size distributions and critical supersaturation distributions) for aerosols resulting from the combustion of various liquid fuels. The hydration of these aerosols is found to obey Kohler theory, and soluble mass fraction results from this analysis are shown.