Abstract:

I will present an investigation of the dust formation process in the atmospheres of a sample of oxygen-rich AGB stars using spatially and spectrally resolved infrared interferometric observations. We successfully compared multi epoch observations to a radiative transfer model of the dust shells, where the central stellar intensity profile is described by a series of dust-free dynamic model atmospheres based on self-excited pulsation models. We determined chemical composition and inner boundary radii of the dust shells. We also estimated photospheric angular diameters of the individual stars.