BIPOLAR COAGULATION MODELING AND APPLICATIONS

We present calculations of the coagulation rate of aerosol particles which have been charged with ions of both polarities. The classical theory for bipolar coagulation has been modified to include distributions of polydisperse aerosols. We include a brief introduction explaining the reasons for the interest in this kind of work. We treat the general case of asymmetric particle distributions after giving a short description of the symmetric case of equal distributions of positive and negative charges. The numerical simulations are done with a measured fly ash distribution taken from the literature. The gain in coagulation speed by applying bipolar coagulation is of the order of 30,000 for particles with a radius of 1-mu-m.