Nucleation mechanism in the absence and presence of an electric field

Abstract

The objective of this article is to investigate the mechanism of the ice nucleation process theoretically by assaying the thermodynamics of the ice nucleus as a small system, and experimentally verified by studying the effect of the static electric field on the ice nucleation process. Using the thermodynamic of small system related to Hill, we predicted that the equilibrium temperature of water and ice nucleus decreases with the reduction of nucleus size. By applying an electrostatic field, the Gibbs free energy of nucleus formation decreases due to this fact that the electrostatic work on the ice nucleus is lower than that for bulk water which it causes a decrease in the critical size of the ice nucleus. The experimental results showed that the nucleation temperature of water increases by applying the electric field with the voltage of 4.5 kV (internal strength of 2.2 × 10⁴ V/m) while the size of ice crystals decreases in the frozen agar gel at the presence of electric field.