Modelling investigation of water droplet evaporative freezing in artificial snowmaking

In this paper, a modelling investigation of water droplet evaporative freezing was conducted in order to better understand the snowmaking process and hence to optimise the design of the artificial snowmaking device. To this end, mass and heat transfer theoretical models of a single water droplet cooling in an air space were established and implemented in a numerical model developed using the software COMSOL Multiphysics. The effects of the air temperature, relative humidity and velocity and the water droplet initial diameter and temperature on this process were identified and analysed, and their appropriate ranges for the snowmaking were determined.