Abstract
Physiological saline (0.9% NaCl) and deionized water were frozen in a laboratory chest freezer and impedance was monitored throughout freezing and thawing. The resistive and reactive components of electrical impedance were measured for these samples during freezing and thawing (heating) within a temperature range between 20 °C and −48 °C. The impedance of saline solution and de-ionized water increases sharply at the freezing point, similar to what is known for, e.g., complex tissues, including meat. Yet, only the saline solution impedance shows another sharp increment at a temperature between −30 and −20 °C. Changes of the electric properties after solidification suggest that the latter is linked to transformations of the ice lattice structure. We conclude that the electrical properties might serve as sensitive indicators of these phase changes.
Highlights
Ice is one of the three phases of water that plays a very important role in the environment and human life
Physiological saline (0.9% NaCl) and deionized water were frozen in a laboratory chest freezer and impedance was monitored throughout freezing and thawing
The deionized water freezes at 0.9% NaCl saline solution points (0 °C) and the electrical impedance for liquid deionized water increase as the temperature decrease from 20 to 0 °C
Summary
Ice is one of the three phases of water that plays a very important role in the environment and human life. The electrical properties are very sensitive to the purity of the crystal and the properties of the material itself. An understanding of these properties is essential in fields such as glaciology, ice mechanics, meteorology, thunderstorm electricity, and more. Many researchers have been investigating the dielectric properties of the natural occurring ice, such as snow, sea ice, glacial ice and lake ice [4,5,6,7,8] According to their investigation, such natural occurring ice always contains many impurities and the effects of such impurities determine the electrical properties. Other authors studied the dielectric properties of pure ice from a viewpoint of molecular structure of ice and found that pure ice has a relaxation spectrum [5, 9,10,11], which can be characterized by the single-dispersion Debye relaxation phenomenon that is described by the Debye dispersion equation, Z
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