Interpretation of freezing nucleation experiments: singular and stochastic; sites and surfaces

By Gabor Vali. 2014

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Publications of recent years dealing with labo- ratory experiments of immersion freezing reveal uncertain- ties about the fundamentals of heterogeneous freezing nucle- ation. While it appears well accepted that there are two ma- jor factors that determine the process, namely fluctuations in the size and configuration of incipient embryos of the solid phase and the role of the substrate to aid embryo formation, views have been evolving about the relative importance of these two elements. The importance of specific surface sites is being established in a growing number of experiments and a number of approaches have been proposed to incorporate these results into model descriptions. Many of these mod- els share a common conceptual basis yet diverge in the way random and deterministic factors are combined. The diver- gence can be traced to uncertainty about the permanence of nucleating sites, to the lack of detailed knowledge about what surface features constitute nucleating sites, and to the conse- quent need to rely on empirical or parametric formulas to define the population of sites of different effectiveness. Re- cent experiments and models, consistent with earlier work, demonstrate the existence and primary role of permanent nu- cleating sites and the continued need for empirically based formulations of heterogeneous freezing. In order to clarify some aspects of the processes controlling immersion freez- ing, the paper focuses on three identifiably separate but in- terrelated issues: (i) the combination of singular and stochas- tic factors, (ii) the role of specific surface sites, and (iii) the modeling of heterogeneous ice nucleation.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atmospheric Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb2a3bbeb963fbf1519140deece0815e20ee656f

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In Aerospace Engineering

  1. T. Whale
  2. B. Murray
  3. D. O’Sullivan
  4. J. Atkinson
  5. T. W. Wilson
  6. G. J. Morris
  7. N. Umo
  8. K. Baustian

In Atmospheric Science

  1. B. Murray
  2. P. DeMott
  3. T. Whale
  4. D. O’Sullivan
  5. J. Atkinson
  6. K. Baustian
  7. T. W. Wilson
  8. G. J. Morris

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