Analysis of the relative supercooling enhancement of two emerging supercooling techniques

• Published in: AIP advances Vol. 11; no. 5; pp. 055125 - 055125-4
• Main Authors: Câmpean, Ștefan-Ioan, Beșchea, George-Andrei, Șerban, Alexandru, Powell-Palm, Matthew J., Rubinsky, Boris, Năstase, Gabriel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Melville American Institute of Physics 01.05.2021; AIP Publishing LLC
• Subjects: Cooling rate; Nucleation; Statistical methods; Supercooling
• ISSN: 2158-3226; 2158-3226
• DOI: 10.1063/5.0051662

We present herein an experimental study on the ice-nucleation kinetics of two recently introduced aqueous supercooling modalities—oil-sealed isobaric supercooling and isochoric supercooling. A series of constant-cooling rate experiments compare the apparent nucleation temperatures of pure water supercooled under these modalities with conventional open-air isobaric supercooling, demonstrating that both methods significantly enhance the supercoolability of the system as compared to open-air supercooling. However, while the mean nucleation temperatures of the two methods are statistically comparable, isochoric supercooling displays approximately half the variability of isobaric oil-sealed supercooling, which may have important implications on the design of supercooling-based biopreservation protocols in which stability and reproducibility are paramount.