Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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Date

2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Chair

Ranganathan Gopalakrishnan

Committee Member

Gladius Lewis

Committee Member

Daniel Foti

Committee Member

Xiao Shen

Abstract

The particle electric charge distribution plays a critical role in electrical mobility measurements of nanoparticle size distribution functions, where it is usually estimated by empirical regression equations. However, there are still lack of methods to accurately calculate nanoparticle-ion collision rates in the presence of strong attractive potentials and to calculate aerosol particle charge distributions with detailed consideration of ion properties. This dissertation consists of three main parts and aims to address the pending issues. The main purpose is to obtain a precise prediction on the aerosol particle charge under various conditions of charging, along with the collision kernel expressions developed and validated. Chapter 2 develops a diffusion charging collision kernel model for attractive Coulombic and image potential interactions between ion and particles. Chapter 3 extends the prior developed model to include the influence of particle. Chapter 4 demonstrates a modeling approach to calculate particle charge distribution through a non-thermal plasma and afterglow. This dissertation presents the theoretical results showing the calculation of the distribution of charges on aerosol particles as a function of particle mobility size and the simulated results are tested by comparison with experimental results. Specifically, comparison with the data of Gopalakrishnan et al. (2015a) with entire ion mass-mobility distribution shows good agreement with predictions of the Langevin Dynamics (LD)-based model, thereby indicating the capability of model to accommodate multi-ion populations and arbitrary shapes of particles. We successfully validated the ability of LD-based simulations to accurately predict rate constants for collision processes in physical systems.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest

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