Nucleation of Water
Farrin A. Reid
March 24th, 2007
Results
I did this experiment between January through part of march wince I ran out of my precious distilled water. -26 to about -40 degrees Celsius was the temperatures in which I tested my experiments. I think however due to the such cold temperatures made it very hard for me to observe super cooling. I suspect that most of my experiments did experience super cooling before I came to find them frozen. I noted on the day that the temperature in side my room was -38 that I could visibly watch the temperature decrease and noted that I saw a regular tap water temperature decreased to -3.5 degrees and then it increased to zero and froze. The other samples with the distilled water ere frozen to, but some of them weren’t and I watch for a few more minutes and they all began to freeze from the top edges into the middle and down. There were only a few samples out of hundreds I did that actually were a supercooled liquid in which I tested them with a few snowflakes and they instantly froze (they turned into a slush and then froze solid). Unfortunately, Out of my excitement, of the few that did work I did not get any media of this phenomenon. However I was able to produce some media just before the project was due :) . I did not use my precious water as i ran out of it however i followed the examples of those videos on youtube and got some Fiji water and suppercooled it for a couple of hours. I used the fiji water also for the superheating experament on my media page as well. In the superheating expirament I put in a spoonful of nestle hot chocolate.