Initial steps of aerosol growth

By Markku Kulmala, Lauri Laakso, K. Lehtinen, I. Riipinen, Miikka Dal Maso, T. Anttila, V. Kerminen, U. Hõrrak, M. Vana, H. Tammet. 2004

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. The formation and growth of atmospheric aerosols depend on several steps, namely nucleation, initial steps of growth and subsequent – mainly condensational – growth. This work focuses on the initial steps of growth, meaning the growth right after nucleation, where the interplay of curvature effects and thermodynamics has a significant role on the growth kinetics. More specifically, we investigate how ion clusters and aerosol particles grow from 1.5 nm to 20 nm (diameter) in atmospheric conditions using experimental data obtained by air ion and aerosol spectrometers. The measurements have been performed at a boreal forest site in Finland. The observed trend that the growth rate seems to increase as a function of size can be used to investigate possible growth mechanisms. Such a growth rate is consistent with a recently suggested nano-Kohler mechanism, in which growth is activated at a certain size with respect to condensation of organic vapors. The results also imply that charge-enhanced growth associated with ion-mediated nucleation plays only a minor role in the initial steps of growth, since it would imply a clear decrease of the growth rate with size. Finally, further evidence was obtained on the earlier suggestion that atmospheric nucleation and the subsequent growth of fresh nuclei are likely to be uncoupled phenomena via different participating vapors.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a8bac1f809fbc4cf483dc3a2cb48878d7198553

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Citations in the corpus

Size and time-resolved growth rate measurements of 1 to 5 nm freshly formed atmospheric nuclei (2012, background): “…al., 2003; Kulmala et al., 2004b, c; Hirsikko et al., 2005; Stolzenburg et al., 2005; Iida et al., 2008; Manninen et al., 2009; Kuang et al., 2010), with some studies suggesting that diameter growth rates increase with size for the smallest particles (Kulmala et al., 2004b; Manninen et al., 2009).”
New parameterization of sulfuric acid‐ammonia‐water ternary nucleation rates at tropospheric conditions (2007, unknown): “Kulmala (2007), New parameterization of sulfuric acid-”
A wide-range multi-channel Air Ion Spectrometer (2007, background): “Subsequent studies on the characterization of the initial steps of the aerosol particle growth have been conducted (Kulmala et al. 2004b).”
Ion‐mediated nucleation in the atmosphere: Key controlling parameters, implications, and look‐up table (2010, background): “143 Yu and Turco’s studies pointing out the dominance of the IMN process include: (1) Yu and 144 Turco [2007] showed, based on a conservative analytical analysis of the neutralization of 145 charged particles, that the observed charging states of nucleated particles (~ 3 - 7 nm) reported in 146 Laak”
Annual and size dependent variation of growth rates and ion concentrations in boreal forest (2005, background): “The growth rate (GR) of particles and air ions can be estimated from size distribution measurements (Lehtinen and Kulmala 2003, Kulmala et al. 2004c).”
Cloud condensation nuclei production associated with atmospheric nucleation: a synthesis based on existing literature and new results (2012, background): “Excluding some sulfur-rich conditions (Jung et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2009), atmospheric sulfuric acid concentrations are, however, too low to fully explain the growth of the new particles to CCN sizes (Kuang et al., 2010; Riipinen et al., 2011; Pierce et al., 2011; Riccobono et al., 2012).”
Sub-10 nm particle growth by vapor condensation – effects of vapor molecule size and particle thermal speed (2010, background): “The actual formation of e.g. 3 nm or 10 nm particles has been shown to be dependent on the processes related to initial steps of the growth (Kulmala et al., 2004b).”