The adsorption theory of heterogeneous nucleation and its application to ice nucleation

Abstract:

In the classical picture of heterogeneous nucleation, spherical liquid caps, characterized by a contact angle, appear on a surface at supersaturated conditions, and if these caps are larger than so called critical size, they grow spontaneously, whereas smaller caps will evaporate. In reality, vapor adsorption takes place already at subsaturated conditions, and depending on the substrate-vapor interactions, the adsorbed layer may consist of clusters centered on so called active sites. The extent of adsorption can be calculated using adsorption isotherms which give the average adsorption layer thickness as a function of vapor saturation ratio, provided that adsorption constants (characterizing the substrate-vapor interactions) are known. We recently proposed a new theory (Laaksonen, J. Phys. Chem. A., 2015) that combines adsorption and heterogeneous nucleation so that it can be used to calculate both the adsorption layer thickness at subsaturated conditions, as well as the onset supersaturation for nucleation. We showed that the new theory performs much better than the classical theory both with flat surfaces, and in the case of water vapor nucleating on SiO₂, TiO₂, and Ag₂O nanoparticles (Laaksonen and Malila, ACPD, in press). Here, we review the new theory, and compare its predictive capability to that of the classical heterogeneous nucleation theory. We furthermore discuss the potential use of the new theory for calculation of condensation and deposition mode ice nucleation in the atmosphere.