Experimental study about solidification processes of sessile deformed water droplets on the biaxial inclined cold plate surface under natural convection

Deformed droplet solidification on inclined surfaces exists widely in engineering fields. In reality, the droplet deformation tends to occur multiple times due to many force factors, like gravity, centrifugal force etc. And the solidification characteristics would be significantly influenced by the deformations. Thus, the sessile deformed water droplet solidification on the biaxial inclined surface is experimentally investigated in this study. By tilting the surface around different axes separately, the deformations of water droplet along different directions would be caused. Then the different solidification characteristics of deformed water droplets are experimentally analyzed, including contact area, height and vertex offset, etc. As found, the effect of inclination angle becomes greater with the increase of droplet volume. When the horizontal surface is tilted to φ₁ = 5° and φ₂ = 40°, the contact areas increase by 18.85 % and 64.2 % for 5 μL and 20 μL water droplets, respectively. The frozen heights decrease by 17.90 % and 19.85 %. In addition, the initial sessile water droplet the position of vertex varies only in height during the solidification process, not in the horizontal direction along the surface. This study could provide the fundamental data for the model about predicting the solidification process of deformed water droplet.