Comparative thermodynamic studies of aqueous glutaric acid, ammonium sulfate and sodium chloride aerosol at high humidity

Aerosol optical tweezers are used to simultaneously characterize and compare the hygroscopic properties of two aerosol droplets, one containing inorganic and organic solutes and the second, referred to as the control droplet, containing a single inorganic salt. The inorganic solute is either sodium chloride or ammonium sulfate and the organic component is glutaric acid. The time variation in the size of each droplet (3-7 microm in radius) is recorded with 1 s time resolution and with nanometre accuracy. The size of the control droplet is used to estimate the relative humidity with an accuracy of better than +/-0.09%. Thus, the Kohler curve of the multicomponent inorganic/organic droplet, which characterizes the variation in equilibrium droplet size with relative humidity, can be determined directly. The measurements presented here focus on high relative humidities, above 97%, in the limit of dilute solutes. The experimental data are compared with theoretical treatments that, while ignoring the interactions between the inorganic and organic components, are based upon accurate representations of the activity-concentration relationships of aqueous solutions of the individual salts. The organic component is treated by a parametrized fit to experimental data or by the UNIFAC model and the water activity of the equilibrium solution droplet is calculated using the approach suggested by Clegg, Seinfeld and Brimblecombe or the Zdanovskii-Stokes-Robinson approximation. It is shown that such an experimental strategy, comparing directly droplets of different composition, enables highly accurate measurements of the hygroscopic properties, allowing the theoretical treatments to be rigorously tested. Typical deviations of the experimental measurements from theoretical predictions are shown to be around 1% in equilibrium size, comparable to the variation between the theoretical frameworks considered.