Calculation of water droplet impingement using the coupled method of rigid body dynamics and the moving particle semi-implicit method

When a liquid droplet impacts on a solid surface, it recoils to the center of that surface after reaching its maximum spreading diameter. The mechanism of droplet recoiling is not fully understood. To simulate this recoiling of a droplet, a particle method is a good choice because it does not require grids for simulating fluid motions, and can easily handle a large deformation of fluid. In this study, the coupled method of rigid body dynamics and the moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method (Park and Jeun, 2011) was used to calculate three-dimensional droplet impingement. Also, the previous surface tension model for MPS (Nomura et al., 2001) was revised to get a more realistic surface tension force. A two-step calculation was performed. In the first step, a MPS calculation was performed with particles that were considered to have no mass or volume. In the second step, rigid body dynamics came into the calculation and considered the diameters of particles being slightly lesser than the initial distance between particles. In this study, the calculated results were compared with the measured data (Kim and Chun, 2000) and the recoiling lengths of droplets for the various initial impingement speeds were estimated.