Freezing is one of the complicated processes in manufacturing high
quality therapeutic proteins. During the freezing process, proteins and
co-solutes in liquid water solution redistribute and segregate in the
interstitial space between ice or ice crystals due to volume exclusion, space
confinement, diffusion and convection, and change of mobility at various
temperature, viscosity, and solute concentration. A critical result of freezing
is known as freeze concentration effect, which may have a negative impact to
the native conformation of proteins. To better understand and describe the
underlying mechanisms of freeze concentration, a direct numerical simulation
that focuses on phase transition and transport phenomena at the crystal level
is developed recently.
This webinar gives an introduction of phase-field modeling framework,
simplified analysis, and computational results to describe the interplay of
solute exclusion, latent heat and mass transfer, fluid flow, freezing point
depression, evolution and coalescence of ice crystals, and the thermophysical
properties in the supercooled regime based on sucrose solutions.