10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
The Kinetics of Aerosol Gelation
PAI LIU, William Heinson, Rajan K. Chakrabarty, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 862 Working Group: Aerosol Physics
Abstract Sol-to-gel transition is a universal phenomenon in irreversible non-coalescent aggregation systems. When the average size of aggregates reaches the length-scale of their average nearest neighbor separation, an aerosol system is said to gel–this condition is defined as the ideal gel point (IGP). Beyond IGP, the kinetics of particle growth remains elusive because of the breakdown of the governing Smoluchowski equation. In this work, we systematically study the dynamics of gelling systems in this regime using the three-dimensional off-lattice diffusion limited cluster-cluster aggregation model. Our results show that beyond IGP, the sol phase particles cease to grow without forming into gels and their corresponding normalized mass distribution remains invariant. This invariant distribution next implies that the sol-to-gel conversion of particles during a unit time is independent on particle size. Furthermore, the relationship between conversion rate and time is parameterized using a power-law, based on which analytical solutions are derived for both the decrease in the total number of sol phase particles and the increase in average mass of the gel phase particles. We conclude this work with a quantitative description on the time-evolution of the monomer fraction in gel phase.