Experimental Investigation of the Homogeneous Freezing of Aqueous Ammonium Sulfate Droplets

Abstract

We have measured the light scattering intensity and homogeneous ice nucleation temperatures from water droplets containing 0-33 wt % ammonium sulfate. In these laboratory experiments, we used a free-fall freezing tube technique to determine the fraction of frozen droplets at a particular droplet temperature by measuring the depolarized light scattering intensity from the droplets in free-fall. Previously reported freezing temperatures for solution concentrations greater than 5 wt % display a larger spread than can be accounted for by the reported experimental errors. We find freezing temperatures in good agreement with the lowest temperature freezing results reported by previous experiments. Our ammonium sulfate freezing temperature data set with water activity less than 0.98 is consistent with a curve that deviates in activity shift by about 5% from the best-fit ice nucleation temperature versus water activity curve found by Koop et al. in 2000, but the significance of this deviation will only be known with further high-precision ice nucleation temperature measurements for other aqueous solutions.