Compensation of Aerodynamic Sampling Effects of a Cloud Droplet Instrument

Precise sampling is a crucial part of the aerosol measurement processes that ideally requires perfectly isokinetic conditions in which particles in the sampling volume move exactly the same way as they would in an undisturbed flow. Such conditions might be difficult to achieve in practical measurement situations where the direction and speed of the air stream may change continuously. We propose a novel method avoiding sampling errors due to moderately disturbed particle flow in case of an imaging cloud droplet instrument. It is shown that despite the non-isokinetic and non-isoaxial conditions accurate droplet density can be obtained by rejecting part of the measurement volume in post processing. The adjustment of the sampling volume is easily applied using a holographic imaging method, which offers multiple well-defined image planes to accurately set the boundaries of the sampling volume. To verify the hypothesis, aerodynamic sampling effects of a holographic cloud droplet instrument are studied using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and particle tracing simulations and by comparing them with wind tunnel experiments. We found out that changes in the airflow affected the particle density mostly near the walls of the probe. It was observed that the error in droplet density could be kept under 10 % by limiting the cross-channel depth of the measurement volume to two-thirds of the full wall-to-wall distance. Further improvement was achieved by using simulation results to formulate a relation between sampled and ambient droplet concentration as a function of droplet diameter and air speed. Less than 1 % deviation in droplet density was achieved in this case compared to simulated values. Orientation of the instrument’s inlet relative to the direction of airflow was found out to have the strongest effect on the achievable accuracy. Results show that the droplets can be reliably sampled also in a non-isoaxial case if the measurement volume was further reduced. Reasonable accuracy was achieved with 10-degree deviation within limited air speed and droplet diameter range.