CIF: An Ice Nucleation Cold-Stage for Research and Teaching

This Community Instruments and Facilities (CIF) award makes the North Carolina State ice nucleation Cold Stage (NC State CS) freezing assay available as a community instrument facility. The instrument consists of a machine vision optical system to observe a thermally controlled surface. The main purpose of the instrument is to observe the freezing nucleation process of supercooled water droplets. The instrument is suitable for studying ambient ice nucleating particle concentrations and laboratory-based process-level studies of the nucleation process. The facility will be advertised at conferences, including conferences that exclusively target professional societies focused on fostering enhanced diversity in science. Interactive educational content will be created and disseminated using a multi-user web-interface that can be used by instructors to supplement instruction in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses.

This project contributes instrumentation and educational resources to tackle the problem of characterizing the abundance of ice nucleating particles in the atmosphere. By becoming a community instrument facility, the cold-stage technique will become more widely available to groups that do not specialize in instrument design. Funds for the award will also yield a public design of a low-cost version of the instrument that can be self-manufactured. This award will enhance the ability of the broader scientific community to use the NC State ice nucleation cold stage freezing assay through the Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences facility and instrument request process.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.