Numerical investigation of impacting water drops in air cross-flow

A numerical investigation of the impact of a water drop on a solid surface in air cross-flow is carried out. For the numerical simulations a multiphase solver implemented into the open source CFD software package OpenFOAM is used, tracking and locating the free surface with the Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) technique. The results are experimen- tally validated exhibiting very good qualitative and quantitative agreement. This work represents an introductory study relevant to the formation of airframe icing resulting from the impact of Supercooled-Large-Droplets (SLD) onto the wings of aircrafts.