Physics Commons^™

Entropic Aspects Of Supercooled Droplet Freezing, Alexander Kostinski, Will Cantrell

Department of Physics Publications

The freezing of supercooled water droplets in the atmosphere, with an emphasis on the entropic aspects of the problem, is examined. Supercooled water is a metastable state and, therefore, the associated phase transition must be irreversible. Temperature-dependent heat capacities of supercooled water and ice are used to calculate the entropy difference. That difference is then used to establish a lower bound on the amount of latent heat that can be liberated by the freezing droplets. The calculation is compared with tabulated values of the latent heat of fusion with surprising results. Based on a novel physical picture of the freezing …