Chemically resolved aerosol dynamics for internal mixtures by the quadrature method of moments

The quadrature method of moments (QMOM), a promising new tool for aerosol dynamics simulation, is extended to multicomponent, internally mixed particle populations. A new moment closure method, the Jacobian matrix transformation (JMT), is introduced and shown to provide an efficient procedure for evolving quadrature abscissas and weights directly and in closed form. For special growth laws where analytic results are available for comparison, the QMOM is also found to be exact. The JMT implementation of the QMOM is used to explore the asymptotic behavior of coagulating aerosols at long time. Nondimensional reduced moments are constructed, and found to evolve to constant values in excellent agreement with estimates derived from ‘self-preserving’ distributions previously obtained by independent methods. Our findings support the QMOM as a new tool for rapid, accurate simulation of the dynamics of an evolving internally mixed aerosol population, including the approach to asymptotic behavior at long time, in terms of lower-order moments.