FlareNet Affiliated Research Poster Wins Best Poster Award at the European Aerosol Conference

FlareNet researcher Timothy Sipkens recently won best poster at the 2019 European Aerosol Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. Sipkens is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he holds also holds an NSERC and Killam research fellowships. Sipken’s research is aimed at developing novel approaches to characterize soot morphology under Theme 4 of FlareNet.

The poster discusses the instrumentation used to characterize aerosolized particles, such as the soot or salt particles generated by flares. Specifically, the work derives new equations to describe how a class of devices, namely particle mass analyzers, classify particles by their mass-to-charge ratio. As the expressions are analytical in nature, they are highly accurate while greatly decreasing the computational effort required for evaluation. These accomplishments pave the way for faster data inversion algorithms, which are especially useful in interpreting higher dimension tandem measurements where pairs of devices are used to measure multiple aerosol characteristics simultaneously. It is these tandem measurements that are increasingly being used to distinguish between different particle types (such as distinguishing between typical soot and salt particles) and to better understand the internal structure of the particles, which greatly influences the climate and health impacts of the particles.