A Community Ice Nucleation Cold Stage Instrument for Research and Teaching

MARKUS PETTERS, Sunandan Mahant, Shweta Yadav, Tommy Kessler, Eva Kjærgaard, Mads Jensen, Merete Bilde, North Carolina State University

     Abstract Number: 238
     Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods

Abstract
This work presents a community ice nucleation cold stage instrument for research and teaching purposes. The instrument is suitable for studying ambient ice nucleating particle concentrations and laboratory-based process-level studies of ice nucleation. The instrument is part of a suite of U.S. NSF sponsored laboratory instruments that can be requested by principal investigators through the Facilities for Atmospheric Research and Education (FARE) Program. In addition to introducing the requesting process, we present the validation data and the design plans of the instrument. The plans allow individuals to self-manufacture a cold-stage using 3D printing, off-the-shelf parts, and a handful of standard tools. Software to operate the instrument and analyze the data is also provided. The underlying principles include that the design and software is open, adaptable, and free of most license restrictions. The design is intended to be simple enough that a graduate student can build it as part of a course or thesis project. Costs are kept to a minimum to facilitate use in classroom demonstrations and laboratory classes.