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Vapor Phase Clustering Model For Water, Richard W. Bolander

Doctoral Dissertations

"Although nucleation phenomena are among the most widespread of all naturally occurring phenomena, even the simplest of nucleation processes, homogeneous nucleation, is poorly understood, particularly the homogeneous nucleation of liquid droplets from water vapor. Homogeneous nucleation involves only molecules of a single substance and does not include the complicating effects due to a substrate or piece of foreign matter. The semiphenomenological liquid drop theories developed nearly three decades ago differ in relatively minor details, with the crucial element of the theory being the derivation of the free energy of formation of the clusters. The clusters are viewed as well-defined incompressible …