Under some conditions a chemical or nuclear accident will result in massive production of aerosols. Confinement of the aerosol becomes imperative and it may not be feasible to collect the aerosol by standard methods. For some nuclear accident conditions, fast sedimentation of the aerosol has been identified as the best strategy. Of the many ways to promote fast sedimentation of particles, one not widely known means is through the use of strong acoustic fields. It is recognized that for a given aerosol suspension with a fixed size distribution that application of an intense acoustic field promotes particle agglomeration. The acoustic field preprocesses the aerosol distribution in such a way as to shift the size distribution of the aerosol from small particles to larger particles.
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