10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
Use of Electron Tomography to Analyze the Actual Primary Particles Distribution and Agglomerate Morphology of Soot
Alberto Baldelli, STEVEN ROGAK, Una Trivanovic, University of British Columbia
Abstract Number: 856 Working Group: Carbonaceous Aerosol
Abstract Measuring the properties of soot agglomerates is fundamental to the understanding of their impact to the prediction of emission rates and of climate forcing of black carbon particles. Here, soot samples were collected from a large lab-scale flare of up to 80 mm in diameter with turbulent flames up to 3 m tall. The flare initial conditions vary in fuel composition, a mixture of methane, ethane, propane, butane, N2, and CO2, according to the burner diameters, 38, 51, and 76 mm. The flare exit velocity ranged from 0.5 to 1.5 m/s.
A previous literature reference showed that imaging soot agglomerates in 3D, with an electron tomography, can help to understand their complex morphology to observe details that are challenging to be determined when analyzing them in 2D. One of the findings from the 3D tomography is that soot agglomerates exhibit ring structures, in contrast to expectations from classical, perfect-sticking Cluster-Cluster Aggregation models.
The electron tomography of soot agglomerates consists of a group of 2D images taken each 2° in a range of view that goes from -70 to 70°. This study aims to use a validated code, designed for the analysis of 2D images, with the results obtained with electron tomography to determine the primary particle size distribution. Thus, the dependence of the primary particle distribution and the projected angle of the soot agglomerate is estimated.