Modelling of droplet impacts on dry and wet surfaces using depth-averaged form.

An efficient time-adaptive multigrid algorithm is used to solve a range of normal and oblique droplet impacts on dry surfaces and liquid films using the Depth-Averaged Form (DAF) method of the governing unsteady Navier–Stokes equations. The dynamics of a moving three-phase contact line on dry surfaces is predicted by a precursor film model. The method is validated against a variety of experimental results for droplet impacts, looking at factors such as crown height and diameter, spreading diameter and splashing for a range of Weber, Reynolds and Froude numbers along with liquid film thicknesses and impact angles. It is found that, while being a computationally inexpensive methodology, the DAF method produces accurate predictions of the crown and spreading diameters as well as conditions for splash, however, underpredicts the crown height as the vertical inertia is not included in the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]