Nucleation at the Contact Line Observed on Nanotextured Surfaces

Abstract:

Surface nucleation, and contact nucleation in particular, are important for many physical processes, including pharmaceutical drug synthesis, metallurgy, and heterogeneous ice nucleation. It has been conjectured that roughness plays a role in surface nucleation, the tendency for freezing to begin preferentially at the liquid-gas interface. Using high speed imaging, we sought evidence for freezing at the contact line on catalyst substrates with imposed characteristic length scales (texture). It is found that nano-scale texture causes a shift in the nucleation of ice in super-cooled water to the three-phase contact line, while micro-scale texture does not. The reduction in the Gibbs barrier for nucleation at the droplet triple line suggests that a line tension, inversely proportional to the surface feature length scale, may be the relevant physical mechanism. A survey of line tension values in literature supports this hypothesis. This work suggests that the physical morphology of a particle, and not just its chemical composition, is important for characterizing a nucleation catalyst.