References

ACP

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

ACP

1680-7324

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acp-7-5263-2007

Inferring thermodynamic properties from CCN activation experiments: single-component and binary aerosols

Padró

L. T.

¹ Asa-Awuku

¹ Morrison

¹ ³ Nenes

¹ ²

School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

now at: Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Texas, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

12 10 2007

7 19 5263 5274

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/7/5263/2007/acp-7-5263-2007.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/7/5263/2007/acp-7-5263-2007.pdf

This study presents a new method, Köhler Theory Analysis (KTA), to infer the molar volume and solubility of organic aerosol constituents. The method is based on measurements of surface tension, chemical composition, and CCN activity coupled with Köhler theory. KTA is evaluated by inferring the molar volume of six known organics (four dicarboxylic acids, one amino acid, and one sugar) in pure form and in mixtures with ammonium sulfate ((NH4)2SO4). The average error in inferred molar volumes are to within 18% of their expected value for organic fractions between 50 and 90%. This suggests that KTA is a potentially powerful tool for determining the CCN characteristic of ambient water soluble organic carbon (WSOC), providing physically-based constraints for aerosol-cloud interaction parameterizations.

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