Deliquescence behavior of organic/ammonium sulfate aerosol

Recent studies have shown that tropospheric aerosols composed of internal mixtures of organics with sulfates are quite common with the organic composing up to 50% of the particle mass. The influences of the organics on the chemical and physical properties of the aerosol are not known. In this paper, we report the solubility of a series of dicarboxylic acids in saturated ammonium sulfate solution as a function of temperature. We also report the deliquescence relative humidity (DRH) of the pure dicarboxylic acids and of mixtures of dicarboxylic acids with ammonium sulfate. For the systems studied, we find that the presence of water-soluble dicarboxylic acids caused deliquescence to occur at a lower relative humidity (RH) than pure ammonium sulfate. In contrast, the less soluble dicarboxylic acids had no measurable effect on the deliquescence relative humidity of ammonium sulfate.