Fog Condensation—The Other Way to Make Little Droplets

Fog Condensation—The Other Way to Make Little Droplets For a variety of reasons, a gas or vapor can become supersaturated with a condensable component. Surface tension and mass transfer impose barriers on immediate condensation, so growth of fog particles lags behind what equilibrium predicts. Droplets formed by Fog condensation are usually much finer (0.1 to 10 pm) than those formed by mechanical breakup and hence more difficult to collect. Sometimes fog can be a serious problem, as in the atmospheric discharge of a valuable or a hazardous material. More commonly, fog is a curiosity rather than a dominating element in chemical processing. 

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