A primary mechanism of heat transfer in spray cooling is the impingement of numerous droplets onto a heated surface. This mechanism is isolated in the present and ongoing work by numerically simulating the impact of a single train of FC-72 droplets employing an implicit free surface capturing methodology. The droplet frequency and velocity ranges from 2000–4000 Hz, and 0.5–2 m/s, respectively, with a fixed drop size of 239 μm. This gives a corresponding Weber and Reynolds range of 10–170 and 330–1300, respectively. Results show that the impingement zone is largely free of phase change effects due to the efficient suppression of the local temperature field well below the saturated value. Due in part to the relatively high value of the Prandtl number and the compression of the boundary layer from the impingement flow, a cell size on the order of 1 μm is necessary to adequately capture the heat transfer dynamics. It is shown that the cooling behavior increases in relation to increasing frequency and impact velocity, but is most sensitive to velocity. In fact, for sufficiently low velocities the calculations show that the momentum imparted on the film is insufficient to maintain a near stationary liquid crown. The consequence is a noticeable penalty on the cooling behavior.
Heat-transfer and solidification model of continuous slab casting: CON1D
