Supercooling and heterogeneous nucleation in acoustically levitated deionized water and graphene oxide nanofluids droplets

Abstract

The supercooling and heterogeneous nucleation factors of deionized water and graphene oxide nanofluid were investigated in this study. Graphene oxide nanofluid (0.03 wt%) was prepared by adding graphene oxide nanosheets into deionized water. A large number of nucleation experiments have been performed to quantify the supercooling degree of acoustically levitated deionized water and graphene oxide nanofluid droplets. These deionized water droplets were supercooled at 2.5–15.6 K, whereas the supercooling degrees of graphene oxide nanofluid droplets varied from 2.6 K to 12.5 K. In addition, the heterogeneous nucleation was investigated by the statistical analysis based on the classical nucleation theory. Results demonstrated that the heterogeneous nucleation factor for graphene oxide nanofluid was less than that of deionized water, and the nucleation area for graphene oxide nanofluid was 4.44 times that of deionized water. Consequently, the nucleation rate of the graphene oxide nanofluid was increased and the supercooling degree was reduced.