A flux-based characteristics method to solve particle condensational growth

Abstract

We develop a new numerical method to predict the evolution of the particle size distribution of an aerosol by heterogeneous nucleation. We begin with a flux-based modified characteristics method. It is conservative and, therefore, maintains constant the total number of aerosol particles and the amount of the total vapor mass and initial particle mass, as is theoretically required. The advantages of the proposed method are: it is fast and with few complex calculations, although its use sometimes demands more computer memory than other methods. The proposed method is compared with exact cases and with the results of other authors for the cases with only numerical solution.