Modeling spatial and temporal frost formation with distributed properties on a flat plate using the orthogonal collocation method

In this paper the orthogonal collocation method is used to solve the equations that describe the frost formation process when a cold flat plate is exposed to a humid air stream. The proposed scheme combines a front-fixing method to handle the moving boundary with the orthogonal collocation method to discretize and solve the resulting set of partial differential equations. Time and spatial variations of frost properties such as porosity and density as well as other relevant variables such as the frost thickness, frost temperature, and heat flux through the frost layer - are predicted with the proposed method. Model results were found to agree closely with available experimental data.