LILAC: aerosoL partIcLe wAter Calculator

Open scientific software for modeling water uptake by aerosol particles, built with collaborators in Chemical Engineering.

LILAC is scientific software for calculating how aerosol particles take up water (hygroscopic behavior). It grew out of my long-running collaboration with Dr. Dabrina Dutcher and Dr. Tim Raymond in Chemical Engineering. That work was supported by an NSF Collaborative Research RUI award, The role of interactions between organic components on aerosol hygroscopicity (2021–2024), on which I was a co-PI.

It ties back to where I started: a decade building software for real-time aerosol measurement instruments before I moved into academia.

• Origins: LILAC grew out of Chemics, open-source analysis software for cloud condensation nuclei measurements that Khai Nguyen built with us from 2016 to 2018 (GitHub). Lily Romano ’20 continued the work as a Clare Boothe Luce Research Scholar.
• Related work: HTDMA design papers at AIChE 2021 and 2022 (see Publications).
• Code: gitlab.bucknell.edu/lilac/LILAC
• Next: a software paper for the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS).