Investigation on the morphology of freezing droplet based on image processing method

Droplet freezing widely exists in nature and various industrial applications. Exploring the morphology change from the microscopic aspect is highly demanding for understanding the macro-icing problems. In this paper, we develop an experimental setup to investigate the morphology of freezing droplet and use the border detection method to detect the morphology at different times. Results reveal that when a room temperature drop is deposited on a supercooled substrate, the recalescence stage is missing, the freezing front is rising upwards immediately until the tip angle arises. We further proposed a theoretical model to determine the freezing morphology. Comparing the theoretical results with experimental results, it shows good consistency except for the tip angle zone. These results are beneficial to describing the complex interface.