Anthony Kearsley, Mathematical Analysis and Modeling Group, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Control of inward solidification in Cryobiology
For many years, mathematical models that predict a cell’s response to encroaching ice has played an important role in developing cryopreservation protocols. It is clear that information about the cellular state as a function of cooling rate can improve the design of cryopreservation protocols and explain reasons for cell damage during freezing.However, previous work has ignored the interaction between the important solutes, the effects on the state of the cell being frozen and encroaching ice fronts. In this talk, I will survey our work on this problem and examine the cryobiologically relevant setting of a spherically-symmetric model of a biological cell separated by a ternary fluid mixturefrom an encroaching solid–liquid interface and will illustrate our work on a simplified 1-D problem. In particular, I will demonstrate how the thermal and chemical states inside the cell are influenced and can potentially be controlled by altering cooling protocols at the external boundary.