Re: [Phys-l] sudden Vacuum freezing

[Brian Whatcott <betwys1@sbcglobal.net>]

At 11:42 PM 5/7/2007,  Michael Edmiston, you wrote:

> ... I've made a lot of
> cooling curves involving supercooling and have not seen any evidence of a
> new structure between ordinary liquid and ordinary solid during
> supercooling.
> ...
> ll about this would include the
> following: (1) I have not done a literature search to find if anyone has
> evidence of this new state; (2) my experiments have not been done carefully
> enough nor in the proper manner to look for this new state.  That is, my
> cooling curves have been fairly rapid (not overnight in a freezer), and with
> stirring.

Though hesitant, I see that Mike acknowledges the abyssmal ignorance
of liquid water's structural details that exists.

> More simple experiments which any of us could try would include: (a) open a
> bottle of the "solidified water" as observed in John M's movie and see if it
> is truly all solid.  (b) Put a thermocouple or thermistor in the bottle
> before cooling, then hook the thermocouple to a recorder before initiating
> the "freezing" and see what temperature the thing comes to.  If it jumps up
> to zero Celsius that would imply a normal partial freezing resulting in an
> ice-water mix.  If it jumps up to something less than zero that would imply
> it didn't start in the normal liquid structure and the end result is not an
> ice-water mix; rather, the result is totally solid or yet another structural
> state not yet named.
>
> Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.


This seems like an entirely viable setup with one detail change.
Knowing the importance of nucleation sites, I would suppose that a stick
 on thermocouple in the exterior of the container would be preferable.
A strain gage might be interesting too.



Brian Whatcott    Altus OK    Eureka!