AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Monomer, Clusters, Liquid: An Integrated Study of Methanol Condensation
BARBARA WYSLOUZIL, Hartawan Laksmono, Shinobu Tanimura, Heather Allen, Gerald Wilemski, Mark Zahniser, Joanne Shorter, David Nelson, J. Barry McManus, The Ohio State University
Abstract Number: 497 Working Group: Aerosol Nucleation: From Clusters to Nanoparticles
Abstract Particles or droplets form by nucleation and condensation in many ambient settings, and particle production is thought to occur via a series of intermediate clusters. For most materials, cluster concentrations are too low to observe these intermediates in the transition from the vapor to the liquid. Methanol is an important exception: the properties of vapor phase methanol can only be explained by invoking the presence of clusters. This talk will discuss our recent work to quantify the amount of methanol present in the vapor, cluster, and the liquid states as methanol condenses. When liquid first appears, cluster formation has already consumed up to 30% of the monomer. An energy balance suggests that a significant fraction of the cluster population is larger than the tetramer, while preliminary SAXS measurements suggest that these clusters contain, on average, 6 monomers.