Numerical study of a droplet impact on cylindrical objects: Towards the anti-icing property of power transmission lines

Power transmission lines play a key role in a nation’s economy and people’s daily life. However, in many countries and regions, due to the geographical positions or meteorological conditions, the transmission lines always suffer the icing problem and huge loss has been caused. One of the promising solutions is the development of anti-icing surfaces of transmission lines. The present work numerically studies the dynamic properties of a droplet impact on transmission lines with different wettability and size. Many-body dissipative particle dynamics is used to perform the simulation. Three dynamic information, the non-dimensional spreading diameter in the axis direction, non-dimensional liquid thickness on the top side, and wrapping angle are focused and analyzed to give insight into the impact dynamics. The simulation results show that the impact on transmission lines with hydrophobic surfaces is more likely to cause the retraction of contact lines. Besides, the liquid film thicknesses variation on the most left and right sides of the transmission lines can be an indicator to indicate if the contact lines reach to or retract from these sides, by analyzing the thickness, four different wrapping modes, non-reaching, over-reaching, reaching-retracting, and wrapping are also identified.