An Electrical Effect on the Growth of Ice Crystals

Abstract

IN the course of an investigation of electrical properties of ice¹, it was noted that the structure of polycrystalline ice grown from liquid water was sensitive to whether or not an electric field was impressed on the sample during growth. In that work, samples were grown in a set of identical cells between gold-plated brass electrodes. Some of these cells were connected to a battery, some were open-circuited, and some were short-circuited. The qualitative observation was made that the crystallites produced in the cells connected to a battery during growth were substantially smaller than those in open-circuited cells and that these in turn were somewhat smaller than those of samples grown in short-circuited cells.