Nucleation curves of ice in the presence of nucleation promoters

•The nucleation rates of ice were investigated using the linear cooling ramp method.•The nucleation rates of ice in the presence of both organic and inorganic promoters were measured and compared.•The efficacy of the promoters was described in details and ranked quantitatively. Ice nucleation plays an important role in many fields like global environment, biology, food engineering and so on. It also lays foundation for further studies in the nucleation of clathrate hydrates and other more complex systems. Although the subject of ice nucleation has been studied for decades, several problems remain such as the lack of reliable heterogeneous ice nucleation promoters. For example, both organic and inorganic additives have been reported to be effective ice nucleation promoters but it remains unclear which group is more effective. In this paper, we employed a linear cooling ramp method to determine the nucleation rates of ice in the presence of a range of nucleation promoters, both organic and inorganic, and ranked their efficacy. The additives tested are; silver iodide (AgI), kaolinite, cellulose, cholesterol, steroid and Snomax. We found that the efficacy ranking among the tested additives was; Snomax ≈ AgI ≥ kaolinite > steroid > cholesterol ≈ celluloses ≥ Teflon wall.