Brief Overview of Ice Nucleation

Abstract

The nucleation of ice is vital in cloud physics and impacts on a broad range of matters from the cryopreservation of food, tissues, organs, and stem cells to the prevention of icing on aircraft wings, bridge cables, wind turbines, and other structures. Ice nucleation thus has broad implications in medicine, food engineering, mineralogy, biology, and other fields. Nowadays, the growing threat of global warming has led to intense research activities on the feasibility of artificially modifying clouds to shift the Earth’s radiation balance. For these reasons, nucleation of ice has been extensively studied over many decades and rightfully so. It is thus not quite possible to cover the whole subject of ice nucleation in a single review. Rather, this feature article provides a brief overview of ice nucleation that focuses on several major outstanding fundamental issues. The author’s wish is to aid early researchers in ice nucleation and those who wish to get into the field of ice nucleation from other disciplines by concisely summarizing the outstanding issues in this important field. Two unresolved challenges stood out from the review, namely the lack of a molecular-level picture of ice nucleation at an interface and the limitations of classical nucleation theory.

Nucleation Curves of Ice in Dilute Salt Solutions

“…One potential reason might be that the nucleation of ice could be either surface nucleation or bulk nucleation, 12 whereas the nucleation of hydrates occurs at the water−guest gas interface. Due to the low solubility of non-polar gases (e.g., methane, propane, etc.)…”

“…11 In the oil and gas industry, studying of ice nucleation would be helpful for understanding the nucleation mechanism of gas hydrates. 10 For cloud seeding and other cases where ice formation is desired, we wish to be able to promote the nucleation of ice, 12 while for the supercooled water on aircraft wings and airfoils 13 and cryopreservation of food or biological samples, 14 we wish to be able to prevent the nucleation of ice.…”

Melting of a single ice microparticle on exposure to focused near-IR laser beam to yield a supercooled water droplet

“…36 From classical nucleation theory, ice clusters nucleate in liquid water and crystallization results when the clusters grow to a critical size to overcome the activation barrier at constant temperature and pressure. 37 In contrast, ice melts by illumination under non-equilibrium conditions and a steady-state temperature gradient will be formed, as simulated by COMSOL in Fig. 8.…”

Uncovering the Dynamics of Confined Water Using Neutron Scattering: Perspectives

“…A determination of the dynamics and the structure of condensed water on the surface of chemical and biological ice nucleators would form the basis for sub-sequent parameterization of cloud physics models. However, until now, this type of information is scarce [59,60]. In the future, the time scale covered by MIRACLES will allow observing relaxation processes related to the coupling of the water hydrogen-bond to the dust-surface groups [31], while Raman scattering can be used to map the vibrational spectroscopic features arising from the hydration shells and the catalyst [61].…”