Wetting behavior of supercooled water droplets impinging on nanostructured graphite surface: A molecular dynamics study

Abstract: In this work, we studied the wetting behavior of impinged and stagnant supercooled water nanodroplet at the atomistic scale using molecular dynamics simulations. We show that water droplet represents a retraction behavior from surface groove nanostructure after indicating maximum penetration. There is a threshold for the value of impinging velocity, v*, below which penetration is not observed which depends on size of the surface roughness. This indicates grooves smaller than a certain size can stop water from penetration, considering v~0.5M in practical situations, which is such a useful information for design of nanostructured ice-phobic substrates. The resistance presumably comes from interfacial tension between solid substrate and liquid water droplet. The extent of water penetration significantly depends on droplet impinging velocity and the size of surface roughness, for impinging velocities higher than V*. Our result indicates the dominant role of droplet temperature on time required droplet recede from surface groove structure rather than droplet impinging velocity and the surface groove nanostructure.