Abstract
We investigate the arrested spreading of room temperature droplets impacting flat ice. The use of an icy substrate eliminates the nucleation energy barrier, such that a freeze front can initiate as soon as the droplet’s temperature cools down to . We employ scaling analysis to rationalize distinct regimes of arrested hydrodynamics. For gently deposited droplets, capillary-inertial spreading is halted at the onset of contact line freezing, yielding a scaling law for the arrested diameter. At low impact velocities (), inertial effects result in a scaling law. At higher impact velocities (), inertio-viscous spreading can spill over the frozen base of the droplet until its velocity matches that of a kinetic freeze front caused by local undercooling, resulting in a scaling law.
- Received 1 October 2021
- Revised 17 March 2022
- Accepted 27 June 2022
- Corrected 28 July 2023
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.074502
© 2022 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
28 July 2023
Correction: Equation (1) contained an error that also required modifications to text between Eqs. (3) and (4), and a minor mistake was detected in the phrase before Eq. (6). These errors have been set right. In addition, two mistakes regarding proof change requests were made by the production staff. (1) In the fifth paragraph, the symbol for the quantity for the density of water was misset. (2) In the seventh paragraph, first sentence, the production team removed the wrong phrase. These errors have also been set right.