Surface wetting effects on the spreading of liquid droplets impacting a solid surface at low Weber numbers

Abstract

A modification to the Kurabayashi–Yang equation, for predicting the maximum spreading ratio of a liquid droplet impacting a solid surface, has been made to account for effects of the contact angle between the spreading liquid and the impact surface. A computational fluid dynamics model was used to generate the correction factor, and comparison of the corrected model to experimental data from the literature shows that predictions improved significantly. The average error between the model’s predictions and the experimental values dropped from 12.2 ± 24.8% for the original equation to 3.6 ± 12.2% for the corrected equation.