1990 Volume 7 Issue 3 Pages 213-224
In relation to the supercooling problem of ice storage devices, experiments on freezing a relatively large volume of supercooled water was carried out. Existence of non-uniform temperature distribution is usually a problem in a case of heating or cooling a large size of material. However, supercooled water has a phenomenon that once ice appears on one spot in supercooled water, the whole supercooled region attached to it freeze rapidly. By making use of it, an experimental method to determine a probability of freezing a large volume of supercooled water with a uniform temperature distribution was introduced. It was accomplished by dividing the water into many smaller droplets. In the statistical analysis, a method to improve an accuracy in a case of having a limited number of experiments was introduced and the probability of freezing was calculated for each degree of supercooling. The average freezing temperature for this experiment was placed just at the extended region of the other researchers results worked on small droplets.
By relating the value with the probability of freezing on various kinds of heat transfer surfaces, which was shown in our former report, the probability of freezing which was independent of the surface was calculated. It was confirmed to be negligible compared with the one on the surface.
