Numerical Investigation of Spray Impingement Heat Transfer in the Film Boiling Regime

Spray impingement cooling is a well-established heat removal technique employed across a wide range of industrial processes. A particularly significant cooling regime arises when the temperature of the cooled surface surpasses the Leidenfrost temperature of the spray. Developing an accurate numerical framework for this regime holds considerable potential for optimising industrial applications such as cryogenic machining and spray quenching. This paper presents a Eulerian–Lagrangian Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) model tailored for spray impingement under Leidenfrost conditions. Two heat transfer sub-models are incorporated to characterise droplet–solid thermal interaction: the first, developed by Breitenbach, is grounded in a theoretical analysis of the droplet impingement process, while the second, proposed by Deb, relies on a semi-empirical correlation. Both models were validated against an experimental correlation obtained from a literature study on orthogonal water spray impingement, yielding mean relative errors of 3.54% for the Deb model and 5.2% for the Breitenbach model across a broad range of operating conditions and surface temperatures.