Clusters in Liquid Fatty Acids: Structure and Role in Nucleation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Saturated fatty acids are used in many consumer products and have considerable promise as phase change materials for thermal energy storage, in part because they crystallize with minimal supercooling. The latter property correlates with the existence of molecular clusters in the liquid; when heated above a threshold temperature, clusters do not immediately re-form on cooling, and supercooling results. Raman spectroscopy, density functional theory calculations, and small-angle X-ray scattering were used to reveal the size, structure, and temperature dependence of the clusters. We found that the liquid phases of fatty acids contain some ordering at all temperatures, with the molecules showing, on average, short-range alignment along their long axes. At temperatures below the threshold temperature for increased susceptibility to supercooling, clusters of more highly ordered fatty acid dimers, several hundred molecules in size, exist in the liquid. Within these clusters, the alkyl chains of the fatty acid dimers are essentially completely inserted between the alkyl chains of their longitudinal neighbors. Above the threshold temperature, fatty acid clusters are smaller in size and number. We explored how the fatty acid clusters promote bulk crystallization and show quantitatively that their presence reduces the energy barrier to crystal growth, likely by a particle-attachment-type mechanism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".