On the recognition of soot agglomerate morphology from light scattering/extinction measurements

A scalar approach was applied for the computation of the scattering patterns of soot aggregate chains. Dissymmetry Ratios were found sensitive to the number of monomers in the aggregate. This tendency appear to be a useful criterion for selecting appropriate scattering measurements and for testing hypothesis on aggregate shape. Once this information on aggregate shape is acquired, an appropriate reduction of the coupled extinction/scattering data can be used to establish some fundamental parameters of the aggregate like the refractive index, mean number per aggregate and monomer diameter.