Investigation of the Splashing Phenomenon of Large Droplets for Aviation Safety

In this paper we numerically investigated the impact of large droplets on smooth solid surfaces to understand the splashing mechanism involved in ice accretion due to supercooled large droplets. A Navier-Stokes solver was used to describe the flow field, the moment-of-fluid (MOF) method was used to capture the droplet interface evolution, and the adaptive mesh refinement technique was employed to refine the mesh near the region of interest. We investigated the effect of air on splashing mechanism and confirmed that a low pressure can suppress the droplet splashing. The size distribution of splashed secondary droplets was studied and showed good agreement with experimental results. The effect of surface curvature on the splashing phenomenon was highlighted. Finally, the droplet impact on a NACA 23012 airfoil was studied and the water collection efficiency was investigated.