Making metal and ceramic powders using aerosol synthesis from vapour precursors, either in a flame or hot-wall tube reactor, is the basis for producing many thousands of tons of powder on an annual basis. To properly study this system, we have designed and built a model reactor with sampling points at evenly spaced axial positions. This allows us to take snapshots of the aerosol population at many points within the reactor. Nucleation followed by a surface reaction produces a solid phase extremely rapidly, within 0.01 s under typical conditions. This is followed by a transient state where nucleation, surface reaction and coagulation all interact to produce a strongly bimodal size distribution. After nucleation is extinguished, the size distribution approaches the selfpreserving limit as predicted for a coagulation-dominated process. The final structure is determined by the dominant sintering mechanism, which can be estimated from theory. The knowledge of this mechanism offers the possibility of selecting reactor conditions to produce powders with optimized properties. From Eq. 1, nickel carbonyl is favoured by lower temperature and higher pressure. The discovery of these compounds paved the way for industrial innovations in the areas of extractive metallurgy and chemical vapour deposition [3].Regarding extractive metallurgy, industrially significant processes for the low-cost purification of nickel by the carbonyl process have been in continuous operation since 1902. In these processes, metals that have the tendency to form carbonyls are readily separated from other metals by passing carbon monoxide through a bed of the finely divided feed, under conditions that favour the left-hand side of Eq. 1. Metals such as nickel will selectively form gaseous nickel carbonyl, leaving other metals such as copper, behind in the bed. The nickel carbonyl can then be deposited as pure nickel by raising the temperature.Regarding chemical vapour deposition (CVD), metal carbonyls can be been used as CVD precursors to make a variety of materials such as nickel-coated fibres, foam and powders [4]. In these processes, metals are deposited heterogeneously from the gas-phase onto a heated template, again using the reaction described in Eq. 1. The kinetics for the heterogeneous reaction