Sensitivities of immersion freezing: Reconciling classical nucleation theory and deterministic expressions

Abstract

[1] Ice particle number concentrations are often described deterministically, i.e., ice nucleation is singular and occurs on active sites unambiguously at a given temperature. Other approaches are based on classical nucleation theory (CNT) that describes ice nucleation stochastically as a function of time and nucleation rate. Sensitivity studies of CNT for immersion freezing performed here show that ice nucleation has by far the lowest sensitivity to time as compared to temperature, ice nucleus (IN) diameter, and contact angle. Sensitivities generally decrease with decreasing temperature. Our study helps to reconcile the apparent differences in stochastic and singular freezing behavior, and suggests that over a wide range of temperatures and IN parameters, time-independent CNT-based expressions for immersion freezing may be derived for use in large-scale models.