Non-simultaneous droplet impingement cooling of a solid heated surface

Abstract

High generation of heat in the electronics industry presents a roadblock for further innovations in higher processing power due to complications associated with overheating. Commonly used air-based systems cannot cool high-performance electronics, mainly due to the relatively poor thermo-physical properties of air. Spray cooling is a technique capable of cooling or quenching objects at very high temperatures and heat fluxes. While there has been considerable research on single droplet impact to study the fundamentals of spray cooling, multiple droplet impingement offers more realistic realisations of the dynamics of spray phenomena. In this paper, we examined the fluid dynamics and heat transfer of multiple droplet impingement using high-speed imaging and fast heat flux measurements to capture droplet-droplet and droplet-surface interactions at constant droplet Weber number. We investigated an individual droplet and two non-simultaneous droplets of water at a constant horizontal droplet spacing and different time separations to analyse the heat transfer at different initial surface temperatures. Although not affected significantly by the surface temperature, the maximum diameter of the combined droplets decreased for increasing time separation due to the kinematic discontinuity from the interaction between droplets moving in opposite direction. For small time separation, the spreading droplet contact line of the first droplet collided with the moving contact line of the second droplet. The receding and the quasi-static contact lines of the first droplet was strongly and mildly impacted by the second spreading droplet diameter, respectively. However, all quasi-static droplet diameters increased for non-simultaneous droplet scenario, following by a small reduction in the droplet diameter when the surface temperature increased due to evaporation. Depending on the surface temperature and time separation between droplets, it was found that the peak heat transfer rates for non-simultaneous droplet impingement scenarios can be increased by 68% to 100% when compared to a single droplet case due to higher combined droplet diameter and fluid volume in contact with the heated solid surface. However, the overall droplet cooling efficiency was higher for the single droplet case, showing that the droplet-droplet interaction can decrease the potential cooling performance of droplets. The present study provides knowledge combining droplet-droplet interaction and heat transfer performance for future spray cooling system design and optimisation.