Energetics of small n-pentanol clusters from droplet nucleation rate data

Abstract

We use nucleation theorems to extract the excess internal energy of small molecular clusters of n-pentanol from experimental droplet nucleation rates. Corrections to the theorems are derived, in order to take into account the nonideality of the vapor phase, but these have only a small effect on our results. Experimental datasets from different groups provide information about clusters of different sizes at a range of temperatures. The analysis shows that there are significant and intriguing deviations from the predictions of the capillarity approximation.