The flow diffusion nucleation chamber: A quantitative instrument for nucleation research

Publisher Summary Two of the more commonly used devices for nucleation research are the thermal diffusion cloud chamber (TDCC) and the expansion cloud chamber (ECC). These devices are useful for making quantitative nucleation measurements but they have limitations that affect their range of usefulness. Flow nucleation devices offer a number of significant advantages over TDCC and ECC systems. While these devices are not without problems, they can quite often be used effectively to produce results not easily achievable with the TDCC and ECC and to provide important complimentary results to those obtained with the TDCC and ECC devices. This chapter discusses the designing, analyses, and testing of a version of the flow nucleation chamber allowing critical supersaturation measurements by the use of a variety of background gases at ambient pressure and a conveniently accessible range of temperatures. This is done to test the quantitative operation of the nucleation chamber comparing nucleation measurements with data in the literature obtained using other nucleation devices and to make preliminary measurements of nucleation in the presence of a variety of different background gases and compare those results with data in the literature obtained using a specially designed high pressure cloud chamber.