Thermodynamics processes and solidification characteristics of ice under transient condition

The heat transfer process between ice and water draws special attention due to wide applications on the development and decay of sea ice and glaciers. The study on water-ice energy transportation can enhance the understanding of the mechanism on the process of ice ridge consolidation and glacier melting. In this paper, the thermodynamics processes and solidification characteristics of ice is investigated experimentally with submerging tests and numerically with the Finite Element Method (FEM). The measurements and numerical simulations are performed to determine the ice growth and temperature variation with various initial thicknesses and temperatures. From the measured and simulated results, we can see that the ice temperature is non-linear distributed in the short beginning and linear distributed in the later process. The mean temperature increases sharply in the early stage and gently afterward, depending on the internal temperature gradient. For the colder and larger samples, it proceeds longer time to reach the thermal equilibrium. Moreover, the ice also grows quickly in the beginning and slowly in the later stage. The dimensional analysis denotes that, rather than initial condition, the true driven factor for temperature development is the Fourier number, which is the ratio between conduction energy and inertial energy. The relative ice growth is dominated by the difference between the Stefan number and the Biot number, which represent latent energy and convection energy, respectively.