Impact of morphology on the radiative properties of fractal soot aggregates

Abstract

The impact of morphology on the radiative properties of fractal soot aggregates was investigated using the discrete dipole approximation (DDA). The optical properties of four different types of aggregates of freshly emitted soot with a fractal dimension Df=1.65 and a fractal pre-factor kf=1.76 were calculated. The four types of aggregates investigated are formed by uniform primary particles in point-touch, by uniform but overlapping primary particles, by uniform but enlarged primary particles in point-touch, and formed by point-touch and polydisperse primary particles. The radiative properties of aggregates consisting of N=20, 56 and 103 primary particles were numerically evaluated for a given refractive index at 0.532 and 1.064μm. The radiative properties of soot aggregates vary strongly with the volume equivalent radius aeff and wavelength. The accuracy of DDA was evaluated in the first and fourth cases against the generalized multi-sphere Mie (GMM) solution in terms of the vertical–vertical differential scattering cross section (Cvv). The model predicted the average relative deviations from the base case to be within 15–25% for Cvv, depending on the number of particles for the aggregate. The scattering cross sections are only slightly affected by the overlapping but more significantly influenced by primary particle polydispersity. It was also found that the enlargement of primary particles by 20% has a strong effect on soot aggregate radiative properties.