Abstract
Understanding the formation and growth of aerosols is important to a better understanding of a diverse range of problems. The identification of key parameters affecting aerosol behaviour is discussed, and a number of approaches for predicting this behaviour are developed in this thesis. Models appropriate to a wide range of industrial processes are used. Turbulent and laminar flow scenarios are considered, and an assessment is made of the likely differences in system behaviour according to whether nucleation occurs by a predominantly homogeneous, binary or ion-induced mechanism. A number of techniques for predicting aerosol behaviour are compared, ranging from the rigorous to more elementary approaches. It is shown that the simpler techniques are able to demonstrate many of the most important features of aerosol behaviour, whilst allowing the isolation of the parameters which influence this behaviour. This thesis presents methods which are capable of rapidly characterising the growth and formation behaviour of an aerosol system, and in doing so has identified many of the parameters which control this behaviour.