Posted on 05/29/2009 5:35:05 PM PDT by neverdem
Our understanding of life and technology at extreme temperatures could become clearer thanks to a microfluidic device that studies ice formation.
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The new instrument studies ice formation in supercooled water
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George Whitesides, at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, and colleagues have developed a microfluidic device that produces supercooled water drops (droplets that remain liquid below 0 °C) and measures the temperature at which ice nucleates in them. The device is two orders of magnitude faster that current state-of-the-art ice nucleation instruments and very accurate, claims the team.
Ice nucleation controls water's freezing process. Studying how water behaves is important for our comprehension of a wide range of processes, including precipitation formation, icing on roads and aircraft wings and life below 0 °C, explains Whitesides.
'Methods of generating fundamental information about water in all of its forms - ice, water vapour and others - are both an opportunity for science and a societal obligation,' he says. 'This study addresses one (of many) unresolved fundamental questions - how does the nucleation of freezing of water droplets occur? The instrument generates statistically large numbers of data under very carefully controlled and very well understood conditions.'
'This is an amazing piece of microfluidic technology designed for tackling longstanding problems,' enthuses Thomas Koop, an expert in supercooled water and ice nucleation at Bielefeld University, Germany. 'I can envisage numerous applications in various fields of metastable liquids.'
Whitesides agrees that the device is suitable for studying other metastable liquids and expects that it will become an important tool.
Keith Farrington
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A microfluidic apparatus for the study of ice nucleation in supercooled water drops
Claudiu A. Stan, Grégory F. Schneider, Sergey S. Shevkoplyas, Michinao Hashimoto, Mihai Ibanescu, Benjamin J. Wiley and George M. Whitesides, Lab Chip, 2009
DOI: 10.1039/b906198c
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Physics and Chemistry of Ice is an authoritative summary of state-of the-art research contributions from the world's leading scientists. A key selection of submissions from to the 11th International Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Ice, 2006 are presented here with a foreword by Werner F. Kuhs.
ping
Is there anything more bizarre than water?
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But how long does it take to fill the ice tray?
If I could only get my wife to stop leaving miniature Lake Eries all over our kitchen and bath counters, I’d be a happy man. It’s her relationship to water that is bizarre. She doesn’t understand its corrosivity and ability to make mildew grow anywhere.
Cheers!
“Cool”
Glass is pretty bizarre - it's a liquid. A veeeeery slow moving liquid. Someone measured the glass in old European cathedrals and - sure enough - the glass at the bottom of a window pane was thicker than the glass at the top. Over hundreds of years it had flowed enough to measure...
*GROAN*.
George Whitesides, at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, and colleagues have developed a microfluidic device that produces supercooled water drops (droplets that remain liquid below 0°C) and measures the temperature at which ice nucleates in them. The device is two orders of magnitude faster that current state-of-the-art ice nucleation instruments and very accurate, claims the team.Thanks neverdem.
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Is there anything more bizarre than water?Isaac Asimov wrote many of his science essays on this subject. Among other things, he pointed out that the unusual property of water involving its solid form being less dense than its liquid form was very important in the development of life on earth. If ice sunk when it froze, instead of floating on the surface, the history of life would have been much different.
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