A corollary of the nucleation theorem due to Kashchiev [Nucleation: Basic Theory with Applications (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2000)] allows the volume V(*) of a critical bubble to be determined from nucleation rate measurements. The original derivation was limited to one-component, ideal gas bubbles with a vapor density much smaller than that of the ambient liquid. Here, an exact result is...

Phase change through boiling is used in a variety of heat-transfer and chemical reaction applications. The state of the art in nucleate boiling has focused on increasing the density of bubble nucleation using porous structures and microchannels with characteristic sizes of tens of micrometers. Traditionally, it is thought that nanoscale surfaces will not improve boiling heat transfer, since the...

The effects of thermal substrate pretreatment on the growth of Au-catalyzed ZnO nanostructures by pulsed laser deposition are investigated. C-plane sapphire substrates are annealed prior to deposition of a thin Au layer. Subsequent ZnO growths on substrates annealed above 1,200°C resulted in a high density of nanosheets and nanowires, whereas lower temperatures led to low nanostructure densitie...

We combine density-functional theory with the string method to calculate the minimum free energy path of bubble nucleation in two polymer–CO2 mixture systems, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)–CO2 and polystyrene (PS)–CO2. Nucleation is initiated by saturating the polymer liquid with high pressure CO2 and subsequently reducing the pressure to ambient condition. Below a critical temperature (Tc),...

Although nanoscale twinning is an effective means to enhance yield strength and tensile ductility in metals, nanotwinned metals generally fail well below their theoretical strength limit due to heterogeneous dislocation nucleation from boundaries or surface imperfections. Here we show that Au nanowires containing angstrom-scaled twins (0.7 nm in thickness) exhibit tensile strengths up to 3.12 G...

A simply and reproducible way is proposed to significantly suppress the nucleation density of graphene on the copper foil during the chemical vapor deposition process. By inserting a copper foil into a tube with one close end, the nucleation density on the copper foils can be reduced by more than five orders of magnitude and an ultra-low nucleation density of ~10 nucleus/cm(2) has been achieved...

The well-known classical nucleation theory (CNT) for the free energy barrier towards formation of a nucleus of critical size of the new stable phase within the parent metastable phase fails to take into account the influence of other metastable phases having density/order intermediate between the parent metastable phase and the final stable phase. This lacuna can be more serious than capillary ...

Here, we describe an improved system for protein crystallization based on heterogeneous nucleation using fluorinated layered silicate. In addition, we also investigated the mechanism of nucleation on the silicate surface. Crystallization of lysozyme using silicates with different chemical compositions indicated that fluorosilicates promoted nucleation whereas the silicates without fluorine did ...

Density functional theory is applied to ion-induced nucleation of dipolar molecules. The predicted reversible work shows a sign preference, resulting in a difference in the nucleation rate by a factor of 10–10, for realistic values of model parameters. The sign effect is found to decrease systematically as the supersaturation is increased. The asymmetry of a molecule is shown to be directly res...