A pyroelectric calorimeter has been developed to greatly increase the level of automation in ice nucleation experiments. The calorimeter makes use of the pyroelectric polymer PVDF, which is highly sensitive, cheap and readily available in a variety of sizes and thicknesses. As a droplet freezes latent heat is released, which is detected by the calorimeter as a voltage spike. These voltage spikes can be correlated with the temperature of the cooling stage. We have used this calorimeter to detect the freezing of 0.2 µl droplets.
