Freezing mechanism of supercooled water droplet impinging on metal surfaces

Ice accretion on power lines is a random natural phenomenon and may seriously harm to the safety of power network. However, the mechanism of the freezing process of supercooled water droplet impacting on wires is still not fully understood. In this study, an experimental investigation on the freezing mechanism of the supercooled water droplet impinging on cold metal surfaces was performed. The morphological characters and the dynamics of a single supercooled droplet collide on the cylindrical metal surfaces had been revealed with high-speed photographing. The experimental data for the surfaces of stainless steel, copper and aluminum, on which the supercooled droplets impinging with speeds of 2.3 m s−1 and 4.3 m s−1 had been plotted. The phenomena of instantaneous and non-instantaneous freezing of the supercooled impinging droplet were identified and the conditional boundaries for these two kinds of freezing were found statistically.