Numerical Investigation of Different Dynamic Contact Angle Models for a Droplet Impacting a Surface in OpenFOAM

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to study the spreading process of a water droplet with a radius of 0.00275mm impacting a wax surface at a velocity of 1.18ms−1 . This type of flow is considered to be Multiphase, incompressible, laminar, surface tension dominated and is governed by the Navier stokes and continuity equations. To accurately model the spreading process 3 different contact angle models are investigated, two of which take into account the moving contact line. The governing equations are solved using the open source C++ library OpenFOAM, which uses a Finite Volume Method (FVM) of discretization and a Volume Of Fluid (VOF) interface capturing method. The VOF method is known to produce unphysical velocities when high pressure gradients exist between the two phases, thus a numerical improvement is implemented to reduce the magnitudes of the unphysical velocities. The improvement reduces the magnitudes of the unphysical velocities and as shown in literature their magnitudes increase with an increase in surface tension dominance. The improvement is implemented together with different contact angle models and results obtained show that contact angle models that take into account the moving contact line gives a good correlation of the spreading diameter obtained numerically with the one obtained experimentally.