Dependence of Laser-Induced Incandescence on Physical Properties of Black Carbon Aerosols: Measurements and Theoretical Interpretation

Abstract

We used a single-particle soot photometer (SP2) to measure the mass of individual black carbon (BC) particles down to ∼ 0.5 fg by means of laser-induced incandescence with an intra-cavity, continuous-wave laser. The incandescence of nine different types of BC samples was investigated to provide a physical basis for choosing appropriate BC materials for SP2 calibration. We estimated the vaporization temperatures of these BC samples from the spectral dependence of incandescence at the limit of the small size parameter x, for which spectral dependence of emissivity is known a priori. The vaporization temperatures differed by less than 2.2% among the samples. For the x 1, the rate of ...