Electric effect during the fast dendritic freezing of supercooled water droplets

An electrical phenomenon consisting of two alternating voltage peaks of up to 6 V amplitude was observed during the rapid dendritic freezing phase of supercooled water droplets in the millimeter size range with supercoolings ΔT in the range of 5 to 20 K. For correlation of the dendritic freezing front with the electric potential, a fast recording oscilloscope was combined with a high-speed camera operating at up to 5000 frames per second. The strength of the effect is roughly proportional to the supercooling and dendritic freezing speed. Furthermore, during the subsequent second freezing phase, which is much slower than the dendritic, a qualitatively different electric potential evolution of similar magnitude has been found which resembles the well-investigated Workman-Reynolds freezing potential (WRFP). The experiments show clear evidence that the first rapid dendritic freezing stage significantly influences direction and amount of the electric potential during the second slow freezing stage. Compared to the WRFP, which takes place for much smaller supercoolings of ΔT ≪ 5 K, the evolution of the presented dendritic freezing potential occurs about 10(4) times faster, is about 10 times smaller in view of the maximum voltage, and shows similar break off concentrations but remarkably does not vanish at low foreign ion concentrations. This phenomenon has direct relevance to atmospheric freezing processes of the Earth, other planets, and satellites.