Ice formation on a smooth or rough cold surface due to the impact of a supercooled water droplet

Ice accretion is considered in the impact of a supercooled water droplet on a smooth or rough solid surface, the roughness accounting for earlier icing. In this theoretical investigation the emphasis and novelty lie in the full nonlinear interplay of the droplet motion and the growth of the ice surface being addressed for relatively small times, over a realistic range of Reynolds numbers, Froude numbers, Weber numbers, Stefan numbers and capillary underheating parameters. The Prandtl number and the kinetic under-heating parameter are taken to be order unity. The ice accretion brings inner layers into play forcibly, affecting the outer flow. (The work includes viscous effects in an isothermal impact without phase change, as a special case, and the differences between impact with and without freezing.) There are four main findings. First, the icing dynamically can accelerate or decelerate the spreading of the droplet whereas roughness on its own tends to decelerate spreading. The interaction between the two and the implications for successive freezings are found to be subtle. Second, a focus on the dominant physical effects reveals a multi-structure within which restricted regions of turbulence are implied. The third main finding is an essentially parabolic shape for a single droplet freezing under certain conditions. Fourth is a connection with a body of experimental and engineering work and with practical findings to the extent that the explicit predictions here for ice-accretion rates are found to agree with the experimental range.

Exploring droplet impact near a millimetre-sized hole: comparing a closed pit with an open-ended pore

We investigate drop impact dynamics near both closed pits and open- ended pores experimentally. The resulting impact phenomena differ greatly for a pit or a pore. For the first, we observe three phenomena: a splash, a jet and an air bubble, whose appearance depends on the distance between impact location and pit. Furthermore, we found that splash velocities can reach up to seven times the impact velocity. Drop impact near a pore, however, results solely in splashing. Surprisingly, two distinct and disconnected splashing regimes occur, with a region of plain spreading in-between. For pores, splashes are less pronounced than in the pit case. We state that, for the pit case, the presence of air inside the pit plays a crucial role: it promotes splashing and allows for air bubbles to appear.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 1 supplementary movie, submitted to JF