Volume 189, 2016

Single-particle measurements of phase partitioning between primary and secondary organic aerosols

Abstract

Organic aerosols provide a measure of complexity in the urban atmosphere. This is because the aerosols start as an external mixture, with many populations from varied local sources, that all interact with each other, with background aerosols, and with condensing vapors from secondary organic aerosol formation. The externally mixed particle populations start to evolve immediately after emission because the organic molecules constituting the particles also form thermodynamic mixtures – solutions – in which a large fraction of the constituents are semi-volatile. The external mixtures are thus well out of thermodynamic equilibrium, with very different activities for many constituents, and yet also have the capacity to relax toward equilibrium via gas-phase exchange of semi-volatile vapors. Here we describe experiments employing quantitative single-particle mass spectrometry designed to explore the extent to which various primary organic aerosol particle populations can interact with each other or with secondary organic aerosols representative of background aerosol populations. These methods allow us to determine when these populations will and when they will not mix with each other, and then to constrain the timescales for that mixing.

Associated articles

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
08 Dec 2015
Accepted
08 Jan 2016
First published
08 Jan 2016

Faraday Discuss., 2016,189, 31-49

Single-particle measurements of phase partitioning between primary and secondary organic aerosols

E. S. Robinson, N. M. Donahue, A. T. Ahern, Q. Ye and E. Lipsky, Faraday Discuss., 2016, 189, 31 DOI: 10.1039/C5FD00214A

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements