Tobias Kyrion

Tobias Kyrion, Graham Alldredge

The Fast Aerosol Spectrometer (FASP) is a device for spectral aerosol measurements. Its purpose is to safely monitor the atmosphere inside a reactor containment. First we describe the FASP and explain its basic physical laws. Then we introduce our reconstruction methods for aerosol particle size distributions designed for the FASP. We extend known existence results for constrained Tikhonov regularization by uniqueness criteria and use those to generate reasonable models for the size distributions. We apply a Bayesian model-selection framework on these pre-generated models. We compare our algorithm with classical inversion methods using simulated measurements. We then extend our reconstruction algorithm for two-component aerosols, so that we can simultaneously retrieve their particle-size distributions and unknown volume fractions of their two components. Finally we present the results of a numerical study for the extended algorithm.

Tobias Kyrion

For the investigation of two-component aerosols one needs to know the refractive indices of the two aerosol components. One problem is that they depend on temparature and pressure, so one needs for their determination a robust measurement instrument such as the FASP device, which can cope with rigid environmental conditions. In this article we show that the FASP device is capable of measuring the needed refractive indices, if monodisperse aerosols of the pure components are provided. We determine the particle radii of the monodisperse aerosols needed for this task and investigate how accurate the measurements have to be in order to retrieve refractive indices in a sufficient quality, such that they are suitable for investigations of two-component aerosols.