Homogeneous water nucleation in argon, nitrogen, and nitrous oxide as carrier gases

Abstract

Experimental results for homogeneous nucleation of water droplets in the presence of argon, nitrogen and, for the first time, nitrous oxide, as carrier gases are reported. The main objective of the study was to investigate the effects of different carrier gases on the nucleation rate. These gases differ in the number of atoms comprising the molecule, which affects the expansion ratio required to reach the target nucleation temperature. The experiments cover nucleation temperatures from 220 to 260 K, nucleation pressures from 40 to 73 kPa, supersaturations of 6.5 to 20, and nucleation rates ranging from about 4×105 to 4×109 cm-3 s-1. The new data obtained with a modernized expansion chamber utilizing the nucleation pulse method show good agreement with available literature data. Another important point of our work is the application of real gas corrections to calculate the nucleation temperature and supersaturation. The results show that the influence of carrier gases on nucleation rate in the investigated pressure range is modest (less than a factor of 7), while without the real gas correction the apparent effect of carrier gas is significant with differences as high as factor of 90.

Abnormal condensation of water vapour at ambient temperature

“…In particular, for the nucleation rate in water condensation, the experimental measurement is greater than the predicted value by 10 2 -10 3 . [40][41][42][43][44] Here, we use the threshold method proposed by Yasuoka and Matsumoto to estimate the nucleation rate of water droplets. 45 The model presents a series of size thresholds above the critical nucleus size and assumes a linear relationship between the number of clusters larger than the threshold and the observation time.…”

Special Topic Preface: Nucleation—Current understanding approaching 150 years after Gibbs

“…The authors discuss the challenges associated with comparing their results to the predictions from the binary nucleation theory. Using a modernized expansion chamber and the pulse method, Lukianov et al 53 investigate the effects of different carrier gases, including argon, nitrogen, and nitrous oxide, on the homogeneous nucleation of water droplets. They demonstrate that after accounting for deviations from the ideal gas behavior, the influence of the carrier gas on the nucleation rate is only modest.…”