Effect of solutes on the heterogeneous nucleation temperature of supercooled water: an experimental determination

Abstract

We investigate the effect of solute concentration on the heterogeneous ice nucleation temperature (T_het) of aqueous solutions of both NaCl and D-glucose. An automatic lag time apparatus (ALTA) technique allows the dependence of T_het on solute concentration to be determined with statistical significance. Our results point to the solute-induced lowering of T_het being a factor of two times the equivalent melting point depression at any fixed concentration, the same factor reported for homogeneous nucleation experiments with small molecular weight solutes.