title: Freezing curve-based monitoring to quickly evaluate the viability of biological materials subject to freezing or thermal injury.
abstract: This paper is aimed at investigating the roles of freezing dynamics of a liquid droplet to characterize the properties of the material. In particular, freezing curve-based monitoring was proposed to quickly evaluate the viability of biological materials subject to freezing, re-warming, or other kinds of injury, which is an extremely important issue in practices such as cryobiology, hyperthermia, or freshness evaluation of bio-samples. An integrated micro analysis device was fabricated which is simple in structure and cheap to make. Preliminary freezing results demonstrated that minor changes in a biological material due to freezing or warming injury might result in a significant deviation of its freezing curve from that of the intact biomaterials. Several potential thermal indexes to quantify the material features were pointed out. Further, experiments were performed on some freezing and thawing processes of small amount of water on a cooling surface to test the effects of droplet sizes, measurement sites, cooling strength, and cooling geometry, etc., on the freezing responses of a water droplet. Their implementation in developing a new micro analysis system were suggested. This freezing curve-based monitoring method may open a new strategy for the evaluation of biomaterials subject to destruction in diverse fields.
authors.affiliation: Cryogenics Laboratory, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2711, 100080 Beijing, P.R. China. jliu@cl.cryo.ac.cn
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Yi-Xin
authors.initials: YX
authors.lastname: Zhou
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001672:Biocompatible Materials / Q000737:chemistry; D002470:Cell Survival; D003080:Cold Temperature; D005615:Freezing; D011309:Preservation, Biological; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D013696:Temperature
chemical_list: D001672:Biocompatible Materials; D011506:Proteins