The crystallization and melting processes for glycerol-water mixtures are often studied for fundamental science and practical applications, such as organ transplant. Organs cannot be preserved by freezing with only water as the medium because ice crystals rupture the cell membrane. Therefore, glycerol is added to avoid incurring damage to organs. Analyzing the phase transitions of glycerol-water mixtures as well as the corresponding kinetics can help determine suitable glycerol concentrations and cooling/heating conditions to be applied. In this project, the phase transitions present in a glycerol-water mixture were further investigated to improve on a phase diagram obtained from literature. Andersson and Inaba (2007) were able to measure the liquidus of glycerol-water mixtures but the solidus was not obtained1. In our work, a thermal analysis was carried out in addition to DSC to confirm the liquidus points and subsequently determine the missing solidus. By varying the heating rate of the DSC, the cold crystallization and melting curves were separated and these results agreed with the liquidus point from literature. We found a solidus point for the 60 wt% mixture to be at 216 K and experiments are in progress to complete the phase diagram over entire molar concentrations range. The energies of activation for both the melting and cold crystallization were determined using Kissinger analysis. In addition, luminoprobes PRODAN and Ru(bpy)32+ are applied to corroborate the thermal analysis data. 1. Andersson O. and Inaba A., Thermochim. Acta 461 (2007) 44–49

TA, DSC and photophysical study of phase transitions in glycerol-water mixture

251st National Meeting (2016)

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