Background on Nucleation Theories

Theoretical approaches to nucleation go back almost 80 years to the development of Classical Nucleation Theory (CNT) by Volmer and Weber, Becker and Doring and Zeldovich [9,10,17-20]. CNT is an approximate nucleation model based on continuum thermodynamics, which views nucleation embryos as tiny liquid drops of molecular dimension. In CNT, the steady-state nucleation rate /, can be written in the form / a where jS, is the monomer condensation 

Before a molecular simulation can be performed the cluster relevant to nucleation must be defined [11,27-29,56,57]. The definition of the cluster is important because there must be some set of criteria that differentiates it from the rest of the 

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