The mass transfer process and the growth rate of NaCl crystal growth by evaporation based on temporal phase evaluation

Abstract

The mass transfer process and the crystal growth rate have been proved to be very important in the study of crystal growth kinetics, which influence the crystal quality and morphological stability. In this paper, a new method based on temporal phase evaluation was presented to characterize the mass transfer process in situ and determine the crystal growth rate. The crystallization process of NaCl crystal growth by evaporation was monitored in situ by a Mach–Zehnder interferometer, and the absolute concentration evolution, the evaporation rate and the real-time supersaturation of solution were obtained using temporal phase analysis, which acted as a novel technique to extract phase variation along time axis recently. Based on the evaporation rate and the absolution concentration, a new method to calculate mass transfer flux during the crystal growth without the knowledge of the mass transfer coefficient was proposed, and then the crystal growth rate could also be retrieved under the hypothesis of cubic crystals. The results show that the crystal growth rate increases with the supersaturation linearly. It is in agreement with the diffusion theories, which presume that matter is deposited continuously on a crystal face at a rate proportional to the difference in concentration between the points of deposition and the bulk of solution. The method is applicable to the research of crystallization process based on evaporation or vapor diffusion of which the precise conditions of nucleation and supersaturation are usually unknown because of the complexity of the evaporation rate and crystal growth rate.