The objective of this project is to identify scaling laws that will be useful in the quantitative analysis of transport phenomena involving fractal aggregates. Such structures are a common feature encountered in aerosol reactors producing submicron particles. Their formation is inevitable in industrial reactors where high output rates are encountered. The PIs will develop a logical methodology for calculating the scaling laws, which will relate cluster size to transport rates and provide a better base for predicting their properties. The problem is an important one with significant practical implications. Fractal-like agglomerates represent a class of geometries frequently encountered, and a general treatment would be of significant value, especially for nanoparticles. While solutions are available for large classes of spherical particles, developing a general treatment for fractal-like particles would represent a major advance. They plan to extend their analysis to the regime of moderate Knudsen numbers. The PIs plan to use the Quasi-Monte Carlo method, recently developed by others, for reduction of computation time.
