Synchronized Multiple Drop Impacts into a Deep Pool

Drop impacts (onto dry or wet surfaces or into deep pools) are important in a wide range of applications, and, consequently, many studies, both experimental and numerical, are available in the literature. However, such works are focused either on statistical analyses of drop populations or on single drops. The literature is heavily lacking in information about the mutual interactions between a few drops during the impact. This work describes a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study on the impact of two, three, and four synchronized drops into a deep pool. The two-phase finite-volume solver interFoam of the open source CFD package OpenFOAM was used. After validation with respect to high speed videos, to confirm the performance of the solver in this field, impact conditions and aspects that would have been difficult to obtain and to study in experiments were investigated: namely, the energy conversion during the crater evolution, the effect of varying drop interspace and surface tension, and multiple drop impacts. The results show the very significant effect of these aspects. This implies that an extension of the results of single-drop, distilled-water laboratory experiments to real applications may not be reliable.