Heterogeneous nucleation in multi-component vapor on a partially wettable charged conducting particle. I. Formulation of general equations: electrical surface and line excess quantities

Thermodynamics is applied to formulate general equations for internal energies and grand potential for a system consisting of a dielectric liquid nucleus of a new phase on a charged insoluble conducting sphere within a uniform macroscopic one- or multicomponent mother phase. The currently available model for ion-induced nucleation assumes complete spherical symmetry of the system, implying that the seed ion is immediately surrounded by the condensing liquid from all sides. We take a step further and treat more realistic geometries, where a cap-shaped liquid cluster forms on the surface of the seed particle. To take into account spontaneous polarization of surface layer molecules we introduce the electrical surface and line excess quantities.

Estimation of line tension and contact angle from heterogeneous nucleation experimental data

Using the classical nucleation theory corrected with line tension and experimental data of heterogeneous nucleation of n-nonane, n-propanol, and their mixture on silver particles of three different sizes, the authors were able to estimate the line tensions and the microscopic contact angles for the above mentioned systems. To do this they applied generalized Young's equation for the line tension and calculated the interfacial tensions using Li and Neumann's equation [Adv. Colloid Interface Sci. 39, 299 (1992)]. It has been found that, for both unary and binary systems, the line tension is negative and the resulting microscopic contact angle derived from experimental nucleation data is most of the time larger than the macroscopic one. This is in contrast to earlier studies where the influence of line tension has not been accounted for. The values of the three phase contact line tension obtained in this way are of the same order of magnitude as the estimations for other systems reported in literature. The line tension effect also decreases considerably the nucleation barrier.

Homogeneous nucleation of n-nonane and n-propanol mixtures: A comparison of classical nucleation theory and experiments

The homogeneous nucleation rates for n-nonane-n-propanol vapor mixtures have been calculated as a function of vapor-phase activities at 230 K using the classical nucleation theory (CNT) with both rigorous and approximate kinetic prefactors and compared to previously reported experimental data. The predicted nucleation rates resemble qualitatively the experimental results for low n-nonane gas phase activity. On the high nonane activity side the theoretical nucleation rates are about three orders of magnitude lower than the experimental data when using the CNT with the approximate kinetics. The accurate kinetics improves the situation by reducing the difference between theory and experiments to two orders of magnitude. Besides the nucleation rate comparison and the experimental and predicted onset activities, the critical cluster composition is presented. The total number of molecules is approximated by CNT with reasonable accuracy. Overall, the classical nucleation theory with rigorous kinetic prefactor seems to perform better. The thermodynamic parameters needed to calculate the nucleation rates are revised extensively. Up-to-date estimates of liquid phase activities using universal functional activity coefficient Dortmund method are presented together with the experimental values of surface tensions obtained in the present study.

Modelling binary homogeneous nucleation of water-sulfuric acid vapours: parameterisation for high temperature emissions

Particles formed in the automobile exhaust might form a significant fraction of fine particles in urban air. We have developed a model and produced parametrizations for predicting the particle formation rate at exhaust conditions. We studied the formation in the mixture of water and sulfuric acid vapors and at temperatures between 300 and 400 K. A thermodynamically consistent version of the classical binary homogeneous nucleation model was used. The needed thermodynamical input data (vapor pressures, chemical activities, surface tensions, densities) are carefully investigated and utilized in thermodynamically consistent way. The obtained nucleation rates are parametrized in order to be able to use this nucleation model in aerosol dynamic models, exhaust models, or other process models. The parametrization reduces computational time at least by a factor of 500.

Nucleation theorems applied to the Ising model

We use Monte Carlo simulations to study a single cluster of "up" spins in a sea of "down" spins in the three-dimensional Ising model. We evaluate the growth and decay rates for clusters of different sizes, identify the critical size for which these rates are equal, and obtain the internal energy of the critical size cluster. The results of the simulations at different temperatures and magnetic fields are used together with the first and second nucleation theorems to predict how the cluster nucleation rate changes when the external magnetic field and the temperature are changed. Our results are in agreement with literature values, but our method requires significantly less computational effort than the simulations reported earlier and avoids the difficult evaluation of free energies.