Experiments designed to provide quantitative measurements of nucleation rates often take advantage of the common disparity in temperatures conducive to nucleation & to growth. However, there has been little quantitative work to characterise experimental thermal histories used in two-stage treatments. In particular, although prior studies have acknowledged that the critical cluster size of interest experimentally corresponds to that encountered during the growth stage, as opposed to the nucleation stage, little attention has been paid to nucleation behaviour when a sample is heated from nucleation to growth conditions. Numerical solutions of nucleation rate equations for the lithium disilicate system were conducted to assess the influence of thermal histories normally used in nucleation experiments on measured crystal number densities.
