Impact dynamics of droplets on the well-designed wrinkled surfaces: Enhancement of bounding ability

Abstract

Designing the nanostructured substrates with efficiently executing self-cleaning functions such as anti-icing, anti-fogging, anti-flaming, and anti-corrosion is always a hot scientific research topic and plays an essential role in practical applications. Herein, a novel substrate decorated with wrinkled structures is investigated. Results show that it has a large improvement in the reduction of contact time compared with the smooth substrate, and could affect the critical velocity of transition between retraction rebound and non-reaction transition. Effects of geometrical parameters of the wrinkled structures on droplet rebounding ability are detailed discussed, such as angles, intervals, and arrangement gradient. Most importantly, a well-designed substrate decorated with wrinkled structures and two confinement walls is proposed, which is found that the contact time could be largely reduced due to the limitation of spreading behaviors of the impacting droplets resulting from the heavy restriction effect of the confined walls. The findings of this work are expected to provide potential implications for many multidisciplinary fields, such as aerospace engineering, industrial manufacturing, interfacial heat transfer, environment, energy storage, and so forth.