An aerosol is a suspension of fine solid or liquid droplets in air or another gas. Aerosols can be generated from natural or human causes. The term aerosol commonly refers to the mixture of particulates in air, and not to the particulate matter alone. Examples of natural aerosols are fog, mist or dust. Examples of human caused aerosols include particulate air pollutants, mist from the discharge at hydroelectric dams, irrigation mist, perfume from Spray nozzle, smoke, dust, Pesticide, and medical treatments for respiratory illnesses.
Several types of atmospheric aerosol have a significant effect on Earth's climate: volcanic, desert dust, sea-salt, that originating from biogenic sources and human-made. Volcanic aerosol forms in the stratosphere after an eruption as droplets of sulfuric acid that can prevail for up to two years, and reflect sunlight, lowering temperature. Desert dust, mineral particles blown to high altitudes, absorb heat and may be responsible for inhibiting storm cloud formation. Human-made , primarily from burning oil and coal, affect the behavior of clouds. When aerosols absorb pollutants, it facilitates the deposition of pollutants to the surface of the earth as well as to bodies of water. This has the potential to be damaging to both the environment and human health.
Ship tracks are that form around the Exhaust gas released by ships into the still ocean air. Water collect around the tiny particles (Particulate) from exhaust to form a cloud seed. More and more water accumulates on the seed until a visible cloud is formed. In the case of ship tracks, the cloud seeds are stretched over a long narrow path where the wind has blown the ship's exhaust, so the resulting clouds resemble long strings over the ocean.
The warming caused by human-produced greenhouse gases has been somewhat offset by the cooling effect of human-produced aerosols. In 2020, regulations on fuel significantly cut sulfur dioxide emissions from international shipping by approximately 80%, leading to an unexpected global geoengineering termination shock.
The liquid or solid particles in an aerosol have diameters typically less than micrometre. Larger particles with a significant settling speed make the mixture a suspension, but the distinction is not clear. In everyday language, aerosol often refers to a aerosol spray that delivers a consumer product from a spray can.
Airborne disease by means of small droplets in the breath, sometimes called bioaerosols.
Key aerosol groups include sulfates, organic carbon, black carbon, nitrates, mineral dust, and sea salt, they usually clump together to form a complex mixture. Various types of aerosol, classified according to physical form and how they were generated, include dust, fume, mist, smoke and fog.
There are several measures of aerosol concentration. Environmental science and environmental health often use the mass concentration ( M), defined as the mass of particulate matter per unit volume, in units such as μg/m3. Also commonly used is the Number density ( N), the number of particles per unit volume, in units such as number per m3 or number per cm3.
Particle size has a major influence on particle properties, and the aerosol particle radius or diameter ( dp) is a key property used to characterise aerosols.
Aerosols vary in their dispersity. A monodisperse aerosol, producible in the laboratory, contains particles of uniform size. Most aerosols, however, as polydisperse colloidal systems, exhibit a range of particle sizes. Liquid droplets are almost always nearly spherical, but scientists use an equivalent diameter to characterize the properties of various shapes of solid particles, some very irregular. The equivalent diameter is the diameter of a spherical particle with the same value of some physical property as the irregular particle. The equivalent volume diameter ( de) is defined as the diameter of a sphere of the same volume as that of the irregular particle. Also commonly used is the aerodynamic diameter, da.
Some devices for generating aerosols are:
Although all hydrometeors, solid and liquid, can be described as aerosols, a distinction is commonly made between such dispersions (i.e. clouds) containing activated drops and crystals, and aerosol particles.The water in atmospheric modelling has an important role with a particular behavior: their different phases (vapor, liquid and solid) are mostly conditioned by temperature which differentiate in practical terms the hydrometeors from other atmospheric particles. The atmosphere of Earth contains aerosols of various types and concentrations, including quantities of:
Aerosols can be found in urban in various forms, for example:
The presence of aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere can influence its climate, as well as human health.
When aerosols absorb pollutants, it facilitates the deposition of pollutants to the surface of the earth as well as to bodies of water. This has the potential to be damaging to both the environment and human health.
Aerosols interact with the Earth's energy budget in two ways, directly and indirectly.
The warming caused by human-produced greenhouse gases has been somewhat offset by the cooling effect of human-produced aerosols. In 2020, regulations on fuel significantly cut sulfur dioxide emissions from international shipping by approximately 80%, leading to an unexpected global geoengineering termination shock.
Aerosols in the 20 μm range show a particularly long persistence time in air conditioned rooms due to their "jet rider" behaviour (move with air jets, gravitationally fall out in slowly moving air); as this aerosol size is most effectively adsorbed in the human nose, the primordial infection site in COVID-19, such aerosols may contribute to the pandemic.
Aerosol particles with an effective diameter smaller than 10 μm can enter the bronchi, while the ones with an effective diameter smaller than 2.5 μm can enter as far as the gas exchange region in the lungs, which can be hazardous to human health.
Therefore, the area under the frequency curve between two sizes a and b represents the total fraction of the particles in that size range:
It can also be formulated in terms of the total number density N:
Assuming spherical aerosol particles, the aerosol surface area per unit volume ( S) is given by the second moment:
And the third moment gives the total volume concentration ( V) of the particles:
The particle size distribution can be approximated. The normal distribution usually does not suitably describe particle size distributions in aerosols because of the skewness associated with a long tail of larger particles. Also for a quantity that varies over a large range, as many aerosol sizes do, the width of the distribution implies negative particles sizes, which is not physically realistic. However, the normal distribution can be suitable for some aerosols, such as test aerosols, certain pollen grains and .
A more widely chosen log-normal distribution gives the number frequency as:
where:
The log-normal distribution has no negative values, can cover a wide range of values, and fits many observed size distributions reasonably well.There is also a practical advantage of modelling the aerosols size distributions with a log-normal distribution, as the n-th moment of a log-normally distributed variable X has a simple analytical expression using the two parameters and which simplifies the model.
Other distributions sometimes used to characterise particle size include: the Rosin-Rammler distribution, applied to coarsely dispersed dusts and sprays; the Nukiyama–Tanasawa distribution, for sprays of extremely broad size ranges; the power function distribution, occasionally applied to atmospheric aerosols; the exponential distribution, applied to powdered materials; and for cloud droplets, the Khrgian–Mazin distribution.
This allows us to calculate the terminal velocity of a particle undergoing gravitational settling in still air. Neglecting buoyancy effects, we find:
The terminal velocity can also be derived for other kinds of forces. If Stokes' law holds, then the resistance to motion is directly proportional to speed. The constant of proportionality is the mechanical mobility ( B) of a particle:
A particle traveling at any reasonable initial velocity approaches its terminal velocity exponentially with an e-folding time equal to the relaxation time:
where:
To account for the effect of the shape of non-spherical particles, a correction factor known as the dynamic shape factor is applied to Stokes' law. It is defined as the ratio of the resistive force of the irregular particle to that of a spherical particle with the same volume and velocity:
where:
Neglecting the slip correction, the particle settles at the terminal velocity proportional to the square of the aerodynamic diameter, da:
where
This equation gives the aerodynamic diameter:
One can apply the aerodynamic diameter to particulate pollutants or to inhaled drugs to predict where in the respiratory tract such particles deposit. Pharmaceutical companies typically use aerodynamic diameter, not geometric diameter, to characterize particles in inhalable drugs.
A differential equation called the Aerosol General Dynamic Equation (GDE) characterizes the evolution of the number density of particles in an aerosol due to these processes.
Change in time = Convective transport + Brownian motion + gas-particle interactions + coagulation + migration by external forces
Where:
where is the mean free path of the suspending gas and is the diameter of the particle. For particles in the free molecular regime, Kn >> 1; particles small compared to the mean free path of the suspending gas. In this regime, particles interact with the suspending gas through a series of "ballistic" collisions with gas molecules. As such, they behave similarly to gas molecules, tending to follow streamlines and diffusing rapidly through Brownian motion. The mass flux equation in the free molecular regime is:
where a is the particle radius, P∞ and PA are the pressures far from the droplet and at the surface of the droplet respectively, kb is the Boltzmann constant, T is the temperature, CA is mean thermal velocity and α is mass accommodation coefficient. The derivation of this equation assumes constant pressure and constant diffusion coefficient.
Particles are in the continuum regime when Kn << 1. In this regime, the particles are big compared to the mean free path of the suspending gas, meaning that the suspending gas acts as a continuous fluid flowing round the particle. The molecular flux in this regime is:
where a is the radius of the particle A, MA is the molecular mass of the particle A, DAB is the diffusion coefficient between particles A and B, R is the ideal gas constant, T is the temperature (in absolute units like kelvin), and PA∞ and PAS are the pressures at infinite and at the surface respectively.
The transition regime contains all the particles in between the free molecular and continuum regimes or Kn ≈ 1. The forces experienced by a particle are a complex combination of interactions with individual gas molecules and macroscopic interactions. The semi-empirical equation describing mass flux is:
where Icont is the mass flux in the continuum regime. This formula is called the Fuchs-Sutugin interpolation formula. These equations do not take into account the heat release effect.
There are two types of nucleation processes. Gases preferentially condense onto surfaces of pre-existing aerosol particles, known as heterogeneous nucleation. This process causes the diameter at the mode of particle-size distribution to increase with constant number concentration. With sufficiently high supersaturation and no suitable surfaces, particles may condense in the absence of a pre-existing surface, known as homogeneous nucleation. This results in the addition of very small, rapidly growing particles to the particle-size distribution.
where is the saturation vapor pressure above a particle at equilibrium (around a curved liquid droplet), p0 is the saturation vapor pressure (flat surface of the same liquid) and S is the saturation ratio.
Kelvin equation for saturation vapor pressure above a curved surface is:
where rp droplet radius, σ surface tension of droplet, ρ density of liquid, M molar mass, T temperature, and R molar gas constant.
Examples of these subsets of the particle-size distribution of an aerosol, important in occupational health, include the inhalable, thoracic, and respirable fractions. The fraction that can enter each part of the respiratory system depends on the deposition of particles in the upper parts of the airway. The inhalable fraction of particles, defined as the proportion of particles originally in the air that can enter the nose or mouth, depends on external wind speed and direction and on the particle-size distribution by aerodynamic diameter. The thoracic fraction is the proportion of the particles in ambient aerosol that can reach the thorax or chest region. The respirable fraction is the proportion of particles in the air that can reach the alveolar region. To measure the respirable fraction of particles in air, a pre-collector is used with a sampling filter. The pre-collector excludes particles as the airways remove particles from inhaled air. The sampling filter collects the particles for measurement. It is common to use cyclonic separation for the pre-collector, but other techniques include impactors, horizontal , and large pore .
Two alternative size-selective criteria, often used in atmospheric monitoring, are PM10 and PM2.5. PM10 is defined by ISO as particles which pass through a size-selective inlet with a 50% efficiency cut-off at 10 μm aerodynamic diameter and PM2.5 as particles which pass through a size-selective inlet with a 50% efficiency cut-off at 2.5 μm aerodynamic diameter. PM10 corresponds to the "thoracic convention" as defined in ISO 7708:1995, Clause 6; PM2.5 corresponds to the "high-risk respirable convention" as defined in ISO 7708:1995, 7.1. The United States Environmental Protection Agency replaced the older standards for particulate matter based on Total Suspended Particulate with another standard based on PM10 in 1987 and then introduced standards for PM2.5 (also known as fine particulate matter) in 1997.
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