A number of modern technological applications require a detailed calculation of the physical properties of aggregated aerosol particles. For example, in probing soot aerosols by the method called laser-induced incandescence (LII), the soot clusters are suddenly heated by a short, powerful laser pulse and then cool down to the temperature of the carrier gas. LII sizing is based on rigorous calculation of the soot aggregate heat-up and cooling and involves prediction of laser light absorption and energy and mass transfer between aggregated particles and the ambient gas. This paper describes results of numerical simulations of the mass or energy transfer between the gas and fractal-like aggregates of N spherical particles in either the free-molecular or continuum regime, as well as the light scattering properties of random fractal-like aggregates, based on Rayleigh-Debye-Gans (RDG) theory. The aggregate geometries are generated numerically using specially developed algorithms allowing "tuning" of the fractal dimension and prefactor values. Our results are presented in the form of easily applicable scaling laws, with special attention paid to relations between the aggregate gyration radius and the effective radius describing various transport processes between the aggregates and the carrier gas. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

A common view is that the current global warming rate will continue or accelerate. But we argue that rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning, CO2 and aerosols, the positive and negative climate forcings of which are partially offsetting. The growth rate of non-CO2 GHGs has declined in the past decade. If sources of CH4 and O3 precursors were reduced in the future, the change in climate forcing by non-CO2 GHGs in the next 50 years could be near zero. Combined with a reduction of black carbon emissions and plausible success in slowing CO2 emissions, this reduction of non-CO2 GHGs could lead to a decline in the rate of global warming, reducing the danger of dramatic climate change. Such a focus on air pollution has practical benefits that unite the interests of developed and developing countries. However, assessment of ongoing and future climate change requires composition-specific long-term global monitoring of aerosol properties.

Diesel engines face tightening particulate matter emissions regulations due to the environmental and health effects attributed to these emissions. There is increasing demand for measuring not only the concentration, but also the size distribution of the particulates. Laser-induced incandescence has emerged as a promising technique for measuring spatially and temporally resolved particulate volume fraction and size. Laser-induced incandescence has orders of magnitude more sensitivity than the gravimetric technique, and thus offers the promise of real-time measurements and adds the increasingly desirable size and morphology information. The usefulness of LII as a diagnostic instrument for the precise measurement of particulate concentration and primary particle size has been demonstrated. Measurements have been performed in the exhaust of a single cylinder DI research diesel engine. Simultaneous gravimetric filter measurements were made for direct comparison with the LII technique. Quantitative LII is shown to provide a sensitive, precise, and repeatable measure of the particulate concentration over a wide dynamic range. LII and gravimetric measurements are shown to correlate well over a wide range of operating conditions. A novel method for determining the primary particle size is shown to be precise enough to distinguish particle sizes for different engine operating conditions, and subsequently the number density of primary particles was determined. LII has also been shown to be sensitive in differentiating the PM performance between four different fuels. The LII technique is capable of real-time particulate matter measurements over any engine transient operation. The wide dynamic range and lower detection limit of LII make it a potentially preferred standard instrument for particulate matter measurements.

Nonintrusive measurements of the optical properties of soot at visible wavelengths (351.2-800.0 nm) were completed for soot in the overfire region of large (2-7 kW) buoyant turbulent diffusion flames burning in still air at standard temperature and pressure, where soot properties are independent of position and characteristic flame residence time for a particular fuel. Soot from flames fueled with gaseous (acetylene, ethylene, propylene, and butadiene) and liquid (benzene, cyclohexane, toluene, and n-heptane) hydrocarbon fuels were studied. Scattering and extinction measurements were interpreted to find soot optical properties using the Rayleigh-Debye-Gans/polydisperse-fractal-aggregate theory after establishing that this theory provided good predictions of scattering patterns over the present test range. Effects of fuel type on soot optical properties were comparable to experimental uncertainties. Dimensionless extinction coefficients were relatively independent of wavelength for wavelengths of 400-800 nm and yielded a mean value of 8.4 in good agreement with earlier measurements. Present measurements of the refractive index function for absorption, E(m), were in good agreement with earlier independent measurements of Dalzell and Sarofim and Stagg and Charalampopoulos present values of the refractive index function for scattering, F(m), however, only agreed with these earlier measurements for wavelengths of 400-500 nm but otherwise increased with increasing wavelength more rapidly than the rest. The comparison between present and earlier measurements of the real and imaginary parts of the complex refractive index was similar to E(m) and F(m).

Laser-induced incandescence has emerged as a promising technique for measuring spatially and temporally resolved particulate volume fraction and size. Laser-induced incandescence has orders of magnitude more sensitivity than the gravimetric technique, and thus offers the promise of real-time measurements and adds the increasingly desirable size and morphology information. Particulate matter emissions have been measured by laser-induced incandescence and the standard gravimetric procedure in a mini dilution tunnel connected to the exhaust of a single-cylinder diesel engine. The engine used in this study incorporates features of contemporary medium- to heavy-duty diesel engines and is tuned to meet the U.S. EPA 1994 emission standards. The engine experiments have been run using the AVL 8-mode steady-state simulation of the U.S. EPA heavy-duty transient test procedure. Results of the measurements using the two methods are compared and the suitability of the laser-induced incandescence for particulate mass measurements in diesel exhaust is demonstrated.

In the present paper a simple and straightforward recipe for characterizing the structural and fractal properties of aggregates from their projected images is presented. Starting from geometrical properties that are directly measured from the projected image-such as primary particle mean diameter, maximum projected length, projected area, and overlap coefficient-important three-dimensional properties including number of primary particles in an aggregate, radius of gyration, aggregate surface, or fractal dimensions, D-f and k(g), can be inferred. Expressions proposed in the recipe to relate three dimensional with projected properties were obtained from an extensive investigation of the structure of numerically simulated cluster-cluster fractal-like aggregates. This involved the simulation of statistically significant populations of aggregates having appropriate fractal properties and prescribed numbers of primary particles per aggregate in order to characterize three-dimensional morphological properties of aggregates. Specific ranges of aggregate properties considered were as follows: number of primary particles per aggregate up to 512, fractal dimension, D-f approximate to 1.78, overlap coefficient in the range 0-0.33 and fractal pre factor between 1.5 and 3.1. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.