The solidification of a disk-shaped crystal from a weakly supercooled binary melt

TL;DR

This paper models the growth of disk-shaped ice crystals from supercooled saltwater, highlighting the roles of heat and salt diffusion, and provides improved parameterizations for environmental modeling.

Contribution

It offers a detailed numerical analysis of disk-shaped crystal growth considering thermal and solutal effects, improving upon previous simplified models.

Findings

Diffusive removal of latent heat and salt rejection are crucial in growth dynamics.

Previous models significantly underestimated growth rates for low aspect ratio disks.

New parameterizations enable more accurate environmental ice crystal growth predictions.

Abstract

The physics of ice crystal growth from the liquid phase, especially in the presence of salt, has received much less attention than the growth of snow crystals from the vapour phase. The growth of so-called frazil ice by solidification of a supercooled aqueous salt solution is consistent with crystal growth in the basal plane being limited by the diffusive removal of the latent heat of solidification from the solid--liquid interface, while being limited by attachment kinetics in the perpendicular direction. This leads to the formation of approximately disk-shaped crystals with a low aspect ratio of thickness compared to radius, because radial growth is much faster than axial growth. We calculate numerically how fast disk-shaped crystals grow in both pure and binary melts, accounting for the comparatively slow axial growth, the effect of dissolved solute in the fluid phase and the difference in thermal properties between solid and fluid phases. We identify the main physical mechanisms that control crystal growth and show that the diffusive removal of both the latent heat released and also the salt rejected at the growing interface are significant. Our calculations demonstrate that certain previous parameterizations, based on scaling arguments, substantially underestimate crystal growth rates by a factor of order 10-100 for low aspect ratio disks, and provide a parameterization for use in models of ice crystal growth in environmental settings.