Supercooled Water Droplet Impacting Superhydrophobic Surfaces in the Presence of Cold Air Flow

In the present work, an investigation of stagnation flow imposed on a supercooled water drop in cold environmental conditions was carried out at various air velocities ranging from 0 (i.e., still air) to 10 m/s along with temperature spanning from −10 to −30 °C. The net effect of air flow on the impacting water droplet was investigated by controlling the droplet impact velocity to make it similar with and without air flow. In cold atmospheric conditions with temperatures as low as −30 °C, due to the large increase of both internal and contact line viscosity combined with the presence of ice nucleation mechanisms, supercooled water droplet wetting behavior was systematically affected. Instantaneous pinning for hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces was observed when the spread drop reached the maximum spreading diameter (i.e., no recoiling phase). Nevertheless, superhydrophobic surfaces showed a great repellency (e.g., contact time reduction up to 30% where air velocity was increased up to 10 m/s) at temperatures above the critical temperature of heterogeneous ice nucleation (i.e., −24 °C). However, the freezing line of the impacting water droplet was extended up to 2-fold at air velocity up to 10 m/s where substrate temperature was maintained below the aforementioned critical temperature (e.g., −30 °C)