Engulfment of an immiscible oil drop in an advancing solid front, both in solidifying and non-solidifying limits, has been studied numerically to understand the freeze front dynamics, nature of the temperature field inside the droplet, and behavior of the boundary between oil, solid, and liquid phases. By varying the degree of subcooling at the boundary, the temporal variation of engulfment pattern in terms of aspect ratio and complete engulfment period has been evaluated. By controlling the solidification temperature of the oil droplet in the presence of a surrounding cold environment, the solidification of the oil drop, along with the traversal of the water freeze front, has been modeled. Due to the solidification of oil, the average droplet temperature has been observed to be larger than in the non-solidifying cases. Insights gained from the present numerical investigation can be applied in applications related to multi-component and multiphase systems.
Kumar et al. (Sun,) studied this question.