Spray freezing: An overview of applications and modeling

Abstract

Spray freezing technology finds broad applications across various industries such as food and pharmaceutical, mining, and water treatment. The significance of spray freezing is to offer a clean and renewable mechanism to generate heating and cooling potentials, frozen particles, or purified liquids. While several studies on spray freezing has been reported in the literature, no compilation of the findings is available, hindering further development of this technology. This paper reviews the diverse applications of spray freezing, emphasizing its potential to address engineering problems. The multi-scale multi-physics nature of the process is illuminated by shedding light on the significant physical mechanisms, including the droplet freezing and spray physics. The modeling advancements related to these phenomena are reviewed, showing the strengths and deficiencies of the current mathematical frameworks for spray freezing. It is underscored that further development of spray freezing requires high resolution frameworks, incorporating the droplet freezing and dynamics models while considering two-way coupling effects of the thermal and flow models of the droplet and cold medium. Additionally, the importance of studying the methods to mitigate the nucleation process of water in an industrially-relevant manner is highlighted.

Keywords:

• Spray freezing
• solidification
• phase change process
• spray dynamics
• droplet freezing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Fonds de Recherce du Quebec.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [NSERC RGPIN-2021-02901] and Fonds de Recherce du Quebec [FRQ-NT-PR-300597].

Notes on contributors

Mohammaderfan Mohit

Mohammaderfan Mohit received his BSc and MSc degrees in Chemical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where he is working on the development of spray freezing technology for sustainable mine heating and cooling. His research interests include multiscale and multiphysics modeling, phase change processes, transport phenomena, applied machine learning, and control theory.

Minghan Xu

Minghan Xu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering at McGill University, specializing in the field of phase change heat transfer. His research employs physics-based modeling, sensitivity analysis, and experiments with the overarching goal of advancing our fundamental understanding of phase change phenomena, particularly for the freezing process. He applies the fundamental research to engineering applications (e.g., civil and mining), including but not limited to phase change materials for thermal energy storage, artificial ground freezing for permafrost protection, and spray freezing for renewable heating and cooling. He received the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Government of Canada. Prior to his Ph.D., Minghan obtained his Bachelor of Engineering (First Class Honours) in Bioresource Engineering at McGill University.

Jundika C. Kurnia

Jundika C. Kurnia is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Head of the Energy and Environment Research Cluster at the Faculty of Engineering and Science, Curtin University, Malaysia. Previously, he served as a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering and Head of the Research Center (GHTeC/STARC) at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) degree from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He is a registered Chartered Engineer (UK), Professional Technologist (Malaysia), and Senior Professional Engineer (Indonesia). With over 15 years of experience in research and development as well as academia, Dr. Kurnia has made significant contributions to his field. He actively participates in voluntary service to the academic community, including roles as an advisory board member, visiting professor, invited speaker, journal guest editor, journal reviewer, conference committee member, and research grant reviewer.

Arun S. Mujumdar

Arun S. Mujumdar holds a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Canada and Doctor Honoris Causa from Lodz Technical University, Poland and University of Lyon, France. He was Professor of Mechanical Engineering at a truly global university in Singapore - National University of Singapore (NUS), following a long tenure as Professor of Chemical Engineering at McGill University, Canada. He is a Platinum Award winner of his alma mater, the Institute of Chemical Technology (formerly known as UDCT), Mumbai, India. He holds Honorary professorships in several universities. His research areas are in transport phenomena, thermal management of fuel cells and battery stacks, energy systems, dewatering and drying and drying processes in diverse industries including foods, products of biological origin, minerals, sludge etc.

Agus P. Sasmito

Agus P. Sasmito is a tenured Associate Professor at McGill Mining & Materials Engineering Department. Having interdisciplinary backgrounds, i.e. a bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics, a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Postdoctoral experience in Mining Engineering, Sasmito's research and educational efforts have focused on advanced multiphysics systems for sustainable minerals and energy extraction. He established McGill Mine Multiphysics Laboratory and his research has spanned a wide range of scientific and technological development for mine ventilation, heating, cooling, freezing and drying, geo-energy, thermal energy storage, artificial ground freezing, slurry, paste and particulate flow, rock-microwave and other multiphysics modeling in mining and energy extraction engineering. He has supervised more than 40 graduate students (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) and postdoctoral associates and has published over 180 refereed journal papers and more than 100 peer-reviewed conference papers. He was the recipient of the 2019 CIM-Bedford Canadian Young Mining Leaders Award, 2021 Principal Prize for Outstanding Emerging Researcher and 2024 Fellowship of Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum.