Effect of chamber pressure on spreading and splashing of liquid drops upon impact on a dry smooth stationary surface

Liquid drop impacts on a smooth surface were studied at elevated chamber pressures to characterize the effect of gas pressure on drop spreading and splashing. Five common liquids were tested at impact speeds between 1.0 and 3.5 m/s and pressure up to 12 bars. Based on experiments at atmospheric pressure, a modification to the “free spreading” model (Scheller and Bousfield in AIChE Paper 41(6):1357–1367, 1995) has been proposed that improves the prediction accuracy of maximum spread factors from an error of 15–5%. At high chamber pressures, drop spreading and maximum spread factor were found to be independent of pressure. The splash ratio (Xu et al. in Phys Rev Lett 94:184505, 2005) showed a non-constant behavior, and a power-law model was demonstrated to predict the increase in splash ratio with decreasing impact speed in the low impact speed regime. Also, drop shape was found to affect splash promotion or suppression for an asymmetry greater than 7–8% of the equivalent drop diameter. The observations of the current work could be especially useful for the study of formation of deposits and wall combustion in engine cylinders.