Generation and optical characterization of aerosol particles with controlled mixed composition

A method for controlled generation of composite aerosol particles is achieved by coating a core particle material, such as glass or polymer beads, with a second (analyte) material on the core surface. The mass fraction of the analyte can be varied over a wide range to generate resultant composite aerosol particles, which for the low end of analyte mass fractions has little influence on the particle size, but can be varied up to mass fractions nearly equivalent to the core material, as demonstrated in this paper. Analysis of this method was carried out using fluorescent analyte and core particle materials in separable spectral bands to measure both particle size distributions and fluorescent emission distributions on individual particle basis.