Frost halos from supercooled water droplets

Water freezing on solid surfaces is ubiquitous in nature. Even though icing/frosting impairs the performance and safety in many processes, its mechanism remains inadequately understood. Changing atmospheric conditions, surface properties, the complexity of icing physics, and the unorthodox behavior of water are the primary factors that make icing and frost formation intriguing and difficult to predict. In addition to its unquestioned scientific and practical importance, unraveling the frosting mechanism under different conditions is a prerequisite to develop “icephobic” surfaces, which may avoid ice formation and contamination. In this work we demonstrate that evaporation from a freezing supercooled sessile droplet, which starts explosively due to the sudden latent heat released upon recalescent freezing, generates a condensation halo around the droplet, which crystallizes and drastically affects the surface behavior. The process involves simultaneous multiple phase transitions and may also spread icing by initiating sequential freezing of neighboring droplets in the form of a domino effect and frost propagation. Experiments under controlled humidity conditions using substrates differing up to three orders of magnitude in thermal conductivity establish that a delicate balance between heat diffusion and vapor transport determines the final expanse of the frozen condensate halo, which, in turn, controls frost formation and propagation.