References

ACP

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

ACP

1680-7324

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acp-11-12663-2011

Evaluation on the role of sulfuric acid in the mechanisms of new particle formation for Beijing case

Wang

Z. B.

¹ Hu

¹ Yue

D. L.

¹ Zheng

² Zhang

R. Y.

¹ ² Wiedensohler

³ Wu

Z. J.

¹ ³ Nieminen

⁴ Boy

⁴

State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Department of Atmospheric Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA

Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 64, 00014 Helsinki, Finland

15 12 2011

11 24 12663 12671

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New particle formation (NPF) is considered as an important mechanism for gas-to-particle transformation, and gaseous sulfuric acid is believed as a crucial precursor. Up to now few field-based studies on nucleation mechanisms and the role of sulfuric acid were conducted in China. In this study, simultaneously measurements of particle number size distributions and gaseous sulfuric acid concentrations were performed from July to September in 2008. Totally, 22 new particle formation events were observed during the entire 85 campaign days. The results show that in the case of both higher source and sink values, the result of the competition between source and sink is more likely the key limiting factor to determine the observation of NPF events in Beijing. The concentrations of gaseous sulfuric acid show good correlations with freshly nucleated particles (N3-6 and formation rates (J3 and J1.5. The power-law relationship between H2SO4 concentration and N3-6 or J is adopted to explore the nucleation mechanism. The exponents are showed a great range (from 1 to 7). More than half of the NPF events exhibit an exponent larger than 2.5. For these cases, the thermodynamic process works better than the activation or kinetic nucleation theories to explain the nucleation events in urban atmosphere of Beijing.

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