Effect of supercooling on the cooling in horizontal cylindrical annuli

이중원관의 냉각과정에 미치는 과냉각의 영향

A fundamental study in cooling and solidification process focused on ice storage was performed, including the interesting phenomena of density inversion, supercooling and dendritic ice. A numerical study was performed for natural convection and ice formation in the cooling and freezing processes with supercooling in a space between double cylinders. When water was cooled under the freezing point by a cooling wall in a cavity, solidification was not started at once, but a subcooled region was formed near the wall. Especially, when the cooling rate was low, subcooled region extended to a wide area. However, after a few minutes, supercooling is released by some triggers. Dendritic ice is suddenly formed within a subcooled region, and a dense ice layer begins to be developed from the cooling wall. Due to the difficulties, most previous studies on solidification process with numerical methods had not treated the supercooling phenomena, i.e. the case considering only the growth of dense ice. In this study, natural convection and ice formation considering existence of supercooling and dendritic ice were analyzed numerically with using finite difference method and boundary fixing method. The results of numerical analysis were well compared with the experimental results.