Monitoring Aqueous Sucrose Solutions Using Droplet Microfluidics: Ice Nucleation, Growth, Glass Transition, and Melting

Freezing and freeze-drying processes are commonly used to extend the shelf life of drug products and to ensure their safety and efficacy upon use. When designing a freezing process, it is beneficial to characterize multiple physicochemical properties of the formulation, such as nucleation rate, crystal growth rate, temperature and concentration of the maximally freeze-concentrated solution, and melting point. Differential scanning calorimetry has predominantly been used in this context but does have practical limitations and is unable to quantify the kinetics of crystal growth and nucleation. In this work, we introduce a microfluidic technique capable of quantifying the properties of interest and use it to investigate aqueous sucrose solutions of varying concentration. Three freeze-thaw cycles were performed on droplets with 75-mu m diameters at cooling and warming rates of 1 degrees C/min. During each cycle, the visual appearance of the droplets was optically monitored as they experienced nucleation, crystal growth, formation of the maximally freeze-concentrated solution, and melting. Nucleation and crystal growth manifested as increases in droplet brightness during the cooling phase. Heating was associated with a further increase as the temperature associated with the maximally freeze-concentrated solution was approached. Heating beyond the melting point corresponded to a decrease in brightness. Comparison with the literature confirmed the accuracy of the new technique while offering new visual data on the maximally freeze-concentrated solution. Thus, the microfluidic technique presented here may serve as a complement to differential scanning calorimetry in the context of freezing and freeze-drying. In the future, it could be applied to a plethora of mixtures that undergo such processing, whether in pharmaceutics, food production, or beyond.