Simulating the Freezing of Supercooled Water Droplets Impacting a Cooled Substrate

Abstract

To study ice adhesion at the droplet scale, a strategy is presented to simulate the impact and solidification of a supercooled water droplet on a cooled substrate. Upon impact, nucleation is assumed to occur instantaneously, and properties of the droplet are chosen to account for the nucleation process. Simulations are performed in ANSYS Fluent using a coupled volume-of-fluid and level-set method to capture the air–water interface, and an enthalpy-porosity method is used to capture the liquid–solid interface. Calibration of a simulation parameter is performed in order to match experimental data for different ideal surface types and surface temperatures. The simulation strategy successfully predicts the overall droplet response for several droplet impact conditions.