Effect of mixing structure on the water uptake of mixtures of ammonium sulfate and phthalic acid particles

Abstract. Aerosol mixing state regulates the interactions between water molecules and particles and thus controls the aerosol activation and hygroscopic growth, which thereby influences the visibility degradation, cloud formation, and its radiative forcing. Current studies on the mixing structure effects on aerosol hygroscopicity, however, is few reported. Here we investigated the effect of phthalic acid (PA) coatings on the hygroscopic behavior of the core-shell mixtures of ammonium sulfate (AS) with PA using a coating-hygroscopicity tandem differential mobility analyzer (coating-HTDMA). The slow increase in the hygroscopic growth factor of core-shell particles is observed with increasing thickness of coating PA prior to the DRH of AS. At RH above 80 %, a decrease in hygroscopic growth factor of particles occurs as the thickness of PA shell increases, which indicates that the increase of PA mass fractions leads to a reduction of the overall core-shell particle hygroscopicity. In addition, the use of the ZSR relation leads to the underestimation for the measured growth factors of core-shell particles without consideration of the morphological effect of core-shell particles. For the AS/PA well mixed particles, a shift of deliquescence relative humidity (DRH) of AS to lower relative humidity (RH) is observed due to the presence of PA in the well-mixed particles. The predicted hygroscopic growth factor using the ZSR relation is consistent with the measured hygroscopic growth factor of the well-mixed particles. Moreover, we compared and discussed the influence of mixing states on the water uptake of AS/PA aerosol particles. It is found that the hygroscopic growth factor of the core-shell particles is slightly higher than that of the well-mixed particles with the same mass fractions of PA at RH above 80 %. For our observation of AS/PA particles may contribute to a growing field of knowledge regarding the influence of coating properties and mixing structure on water uptake.