Plane exhaust sampling

Mackdog

Senior Member.
I wanted to share this because I think it could be useful in debunking, and I didn't know what thread to put it under, but it is video of aircraft exhaust being sampled by a NASA Falcon 20-E5 aircraft. They are taking samples of particulate matter in the exhaust of a DC-8 and also the ice crystals of the contrail. There may be data out there on the samples, but I have not had time to check yet.

 
A similar but much older study using a Sabreliner is quite well known - you can read the paper here.

One of the things they found is that a contrail can contain as much as 10,000 times as much water as the engine is generating - it is part of the "ice budget" argument you can search for on here - there's a lot about it :)

Essentially it amounts to the fact that no aircraft can carry enough of anything to make a contrail as long as those that are being seen - so whatever is in the contrails has to come from the atmosphere, hence is not being "sprayed".
 
A similar but much older study using a Sabreliner is quite well known - you can read the paper here.

One of the things they found is that a contrail can contain as much as 10,000 times as much water as the engine is generating - it is part of the "ice budget" argument you can search for on here - there's a lot about it :)

Essentially it amounts to the fact that no aircraft can carry enough of anything to make a contrail as long as those that are being seen - so whatever is in the contrails has to come from the atmosphere, hence is not being "sprayed".

They have started devising "work-arounds" for the ice budget problem. One is that whatever chemical is being "sprayed" is causing some sort of chemical reaction(unspecified or explained further). Second is that the reason for the atmospheric moisture aggregating from the atmosphere is that released "nano-particles" are acting as condensation nuclei.
 
The ACCESS II programme has it's web page here - they are actually looking at what makes contrails:

"The story so far":


Measurements taken during ACCESS I in 2013 of the burned blended fuel showed soot emissions were reduced by 40 to 60 percent compared to JP-8 fuel by itself, according to Bruce Anderson, NASA's principal investigator for the ACCESS program.
"We saw big changes in soot emissions from the DC-8, but we weren't able to make clear ties between the type of fuel burned and formation of contrails. So for ACCESS II we really want to dig into that," Anderson said.
Understanding more about contrail formation is important because they are considered an essential variable in discussions about climate change.
While it is known that contrails are ice particles that form when water vapor from jet exhaust condenses and freezes on some source of nuclei, there are a number of different models to suggest what the source of the nuclei might be, Anderson said.
The source could be soot from the jet engine exhaust, so the use of alternate fuels might reduce contrail formation. The source could be from the sulfur that is present in jet fuels, so a low-sulfur or non-sulfur fuel might make a difference. And still other models suggest that just the presence of normal background aerosols in the atmosphere is enough to trigger contrails.
"It could be any or all of those things. Some people say there’s so much water vapor in the exhaust of an aircraft that any particles at all will seed the formation of ice," Anderson said.
To help test at least one of those possibilities, for ACCESS II the DC-8 will fly with both a low sulfur and high sulfur grade of JP-8 jet fuel.
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