New approach for the determination of aerosol refractive indices – Part II: Experimental set-up and application to amorphous silica particles

Abstract

This article is the Part II of a work aimed at proposing a new method for determining the optical constants of aerosols. The Part I detailed the theoretical and numerical basis of an algorithm devoted to retrieve the imaginary and the real part of complex refractive indices from extinction spectra of aerosols. This algorithm associates the Mie theory, the single subtractive Kramers-Kronig relation, and an optimal estimation method in an iterative process. This Part II presents the experimental set-up developed to record simultaneously high spectral resolution extinction spectra and size distributions of airborne silica particles. Extinction spectra are measured with a high spectral resolution on a broad spectral range, including both infrared (650−2,500cm−1) and UV-visible (9,000−32,500cm−1) spectral regions. Experimental data were used to retrieve the complex refractive indices of aerosol particles. By associating the numerical procedure presented in the first paper and this experimental set-up, complex refractive indices of silica spherical aerosol particles have been determined under controlled experimental conditions. Additional comparison between experimental and simulated extinction spectra from retrieved complex refractive indices shows that this new methodology provides optical properties representative of the material.