A Dual Diffusion Chamber for Observing Ice Crystal Growth on c-Axis Ice Needles

Abstract

We describe a dual diffusion chamber for observing ice crystal growth from water vapor in air as a function of temperature and supersaturation. In the first diffusion chamber, thin c-axis ice needles with tip radii ~100 nm are grown to lengths of ~2 mm. The needle crystals are then transported to a second diffusion chamber where the temperature and supersaturation can be independently controlled. By creating a linear temperature gradient in the second chamber, convection currents are suppressed and the supersaturation can be modeled with high accuracy. The c-axis needle crystals provide a unique starting geometry compared with other experiments, and the dual diffusion chamber allows rapid quantitative observations of ice growth behavior over a wide range of environmental conditions.

References in corpus (8)

• Numerical computations of facetted pattern formation in snow crystal growth
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• A Taxonomy of Snow Crystal Growth Behaviors: 1. Using c-axis Ice Needles as Seed Crystals
• An experimental apparatus for observing deterministic structure formation in plate-on-pedestal ice crystal growth
• Toward a Comprehensive Model of Snow Crystal Growth: 8. Characterizing Structure-Dependent Attachment Kinetics near -14 C
• Triangular Snowflakes: Growing Structures with Three-fold Symmetry using a Hexagonal Ice Crystal Lattice