Development, Characterization, and Validation of a Cold Stage-Based Ice Nucleation Array (PKU-INA)
Jie Chen,
Xiangyu Pei,
Hong Wang,
Jingchuan Chen,
Yishu Zhu,
Mingjin Tang,
Zhijun Wu
Affiliations
Jie Chen
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Xiangyu Pei
Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Gothenburg, 41296 Gothenburg, Sweden
Hong Wang
Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100190, China
Jingchuan Chen
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Yishu Zhu
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Mingjin Tang
State Key Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Environmental Protection and Resources Utilization, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510640, China
Zhijun Wu
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
A drop-freeze array (PeKing University Ice Nucleation Array, PKU-INA) was developed based on the cold-stage method to investigate heterogeneous ice nucleation properties of atmospheric particles in the immersion freezing mode from −30 to 0 °C. The instrumental details as well as characterization and performance evaluation are described in this paper. A careful temperature calibration protocol was developed in our work. The uncertainties in the reported temperatures were found to be less than 0.4 °C at various cooling rates after calibration. We also measured the ice nucleation activities of droplets containing different mass concentrations of illite NX, and the results obtained in our work show good agreement with those reported previously using other instruments with similar principles. Overall, we show that our newly developed PKU-INA is a robust and reliable instrument for investigation of heterogeneous ice nucleation in the immersion freezing mode.
