Heterogeneous ice nucleation on model substrates

TL;DR

This study uses molecular simulations to analyze how different substrate lattice structures and orientations influence ice nucleation, revealing the importance of crystal plane orientation and liquid structuring in nucleation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Classical Nucleation Theory to estimate contact angles and nucleation parameters from simulation data, validating the theory at small cluster sizes.

Findings

Certain crystal planes significantly enhance ice nucleation.

More structured adjacent liquid layers correlate with higher nucleation efficiency.

The classical nucleation theory estimates align with microscopic analysis.

Abstract

Ice nucleation is greatly important in areas as diverse as climate change, cryobiology, geology or food industry. Predicting the ability of a substrate to induce the nucleation of ice from supercooled water is a difficult problem. Here, we use molecular simulations to analyse how the ice nucleating ability is affected by the substrate lattice structure and orientation. We focus on different model lattices: simple cubic, body centred cubic and face centred cubic, and assess their ability to induce ice nucleation by calculating nucleation rates. Several orientations are studied for the case of the face centred cubic lattice. Curiously, a hexagonal symmetry does not guarantee a better ice nucleating ability. By comparing the body centred cubic and the cubic lattices we determined that there is a significant role of the underlying crystal plane(s) on ice nucleation. The structure of the liquid layer adjacent to the substrate reveals that more efficient nucleants induce a more structured liquid. The most efficient substrates present a strong sensitivity of their ice nucleating ability to the lattice parameters. Introducing a novel methodological approach, we use Classical Nucleation Theory to estimate the contact angle of the ice nucleus on the studied substrates from the calculated nucleation rates. The method also provides the nucleation free energy barrier height, the kinetic pre-factor and the critical cluster size. The latter is in agreement with the nucleus size obtained through a microscopic analysis of the nucleation trajectories, which supports the validity of Classical Nucleation Theory down to small critical clusters.