An Investigation of Ice Formation Behavior in Vertical Annular Flow

This study investigates the ice formation behavior in an annular flow under initial flow velocities ranging from 0.20 to 0.45 m/s. The experiment was performed to validate the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The results indicate that lower flow velocities, 0.20-0.35 m/s, promote continuous ice growth leading to full the annular passage, whereas higher velocities, 0.40-0.45 m/s, suppress ice accumulation due to enhanced convective heat transfer and disruption of the mushy zone. Importantly, it was found that the ice growth rate decreases with increasing initial flow velocities. Furthermore, the correlations for predicting the ice thickness and ice growth rate with time as power functions were developed. The correlations agreed well with the simulation results. This information is very useful for design, and operating the tubular ice machines which has never found in literatures.