Transient freezing of water in a square channel: An experimental investigation

This paper presents an experimental study for the transient growth of an ice layer in a square channel under laminar flow conditions and a mixed convection heat transfer regime. The ice layer was grown from a cold plate located at the bottom of the channel, capable of reaching temperatures between 0 and −20 °C. The onset of ice formation was marked by a sudden sharp increase of the cold plate temperature followed by a rapid spreading of the ice over the cold plate surface. This was attributed to subcooling effects within the thermal boundary layer of the flow. The flow field was measured using particle image velocimetry (PIV) and the ice profiles were measured at several instances of time after the onset of freezing by a visual tracing of the solid–liquid interface. In addition, a parametric study was performed regarding the effect of the cold plate temperature and the flow rate on the ice growth rate. Suitable approximations to the experimental boundary conditions were found after a detailed analysis of the cold plate's transient temperature response, which could be readily implemented in numerical software. An important novelty of the present work is the measurement of the transient ice development of the ice-layer near the inlet of the channel, in addition to the centre of the channel where the flow is more developed. As such, a comprehensive and well-described experimental data set was generated for transient freezing in laminar internal flow. With this approach, a very good agreement was obtained between the experimental results and numerical simulations which were included to indicate the suitability of the current experimental campaign for numerical benchmarking purposes.