Séminaire Wladimir Sarlin (LadHyX)
Wetting, spreading and impact of water droplets on ice
Wladimir Sarlin1, Rodolphe Grivet1, Daniel-Vito Papa1, Julien Xu1, Alexander Rosenbaum1, Axel Huerre2, Thomas Séon, and Christophe Josserand1
1Laboratoire d’Hydrodynamique, CNRS, École polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 91120 Palaiseau, France
2Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes, UMR CNRS 7057, Universit´e Paris Cité, 75013 Paris, France
3Institut Franco-Argentin de Dynamique des Fluides pour l’Environnement, IRL 2027, CNRS, UBA, CONICET, Buenos Aires,
Argentine
A wide variety of ice structures result from the interplay between phase change (freezing or melting) and capillary flows (such as drops, rivulets and liquid films), including ice accretion on airplanes, icicles, frozen rivers and naled ice shields. However, despite this ubiquitous coexistence of ice and capillary flows in Nature, several open questions remain regarding their interaction and the resulting ice morphogenesis. [1]
In the present talk, I will present two experimental studies that we recently conducted
on the subject. In the first [3], experiments of water droplet deposition on ice layers with varying surface temperatures were conducted to elucidate a long-standing issue: does water wet its own solid phase? Then, a second experimental work has been dedicated to the particular case of water drop impact on ice, with the aim of determining how far does a water droplet spread when impacting in the presence of basal solidification or melting [2]. Both the liquid and substrate temperatures were then varied, along with the height of fall.
References
[1] A. Huerre, C. Josserand, and T. Séon. “Freezing and Capillarity”. In: Annu. Rev.
Fluid Mech. 57 (2025), pp. 257–284.
[2] W. Sarlin et al. “Role of melting and solidification in the spreading of an impacting
water drop”. In: J. Fluid Mech. 996 (2024), A14.
[3] W. Sarlin et al. “The macroscopic contact angle of water on ice”. In: Journal of Fluid
Mechanics 1019 (2025), A31.