Monte Carlo simulation of multicomponent aerosols undergoing simultaneous coagulation and condensation

Abstract

A Monte Carlo method was developed to simulate multicomponent aerosol dynamics, specifically with simultaneous coagulation and fast condensation where the sectional method suffers from numerical diffusion. This method captures both composition and size distributions of the aerosols. In other words, the composition distribution can be obtained as a function of particle size. In this method, particles are grouped into bins according to their size, and coagulation is simulated by statistical sampling. Condensation is incorporated into the Monte Carlo method in a deterministic way. If bins with fixed boundaries are used to simulate the condensation process numerical dispersion occurs, and thus a moving bins approach was developed to eliminate numerical dispersion. The method was validated against analytical solutions, showing excellent agreement. An example of the usefulness of this model in understanding aerosol evolution is presented. The effects of the number of particles and number of bins on the accuracy of the numerical results are also discussed. It was found that with 20 bins per decade and 105 particles in the control volume results with less than 5% error can be obtained. The results are further improved to within 2% error by filtering the statistical noise with a cubic spline algorithm.