A hypothetical mechanism of carbon black formation based on molecular ballistic deposition

Motivated by recent experimental investigations of carbon black surface rou ghness and several new results emphasising the role of fullerene like precu rsor structures in carbon black formation, a first attempt for modelling th e nucleation and surface growth mechanisms during furnace black processing is presented, It is shown that the experimentally detected universal surfac e morphology independent of grade number can be explained on the one side b y numerical simulations of molecular ballistic deposition models and on the other side by the anisotropic KPZ equation, A particular solution of this equation, i.e. a circular shaped and pyramidal layered Toom interface, comp ares fairly well to the morphology obtained from TEM images of carbon black on nanoscopic length scales.