Numerical investigation of impacting heat transfer of binary droplets on superhydrophobic substrates

Abstract

The droplet impacting on a substrate is widely encountered in daily life and industrial applications. In this paper, the impact dynamics and heat transfer are numerically simulated for both single droplet and binary droplets on a hot superhydrophobic substrate. The dimensionless numerical model is built up through the transient 2D axisymmetric model with a volume of fluid (VOF) model. The effect of the Weber number, Reynolds number, size ratio, contact angle on the spreading dynamics and heat transfer is investigated in details. It is found that the spreading factor and contact time increase with the increasing Weber number. Besides, the maximum spreading factor and contact time of binary droplets are larger than those of a single droplet under the same Reynolds and Weber numbers. The transient heat transfer rate of a single droplet is larger than that of binary droplets impingement due to larger spreading surface area-to-volume. The total input heat of a single droplet is generally larger than that of binary droplets except at large Weber numbers, and the equal-sized binary droplets have the larger total input heat than un-equal-sized binary droplets. For binary droplets impact on a hot superhydrophobic surface, the hot substrate can promote the spreading and retard the receding due to thermo-capillary effect, and thus will enhance heat transfer between the droplet and the hot substrate. These findings may be helpful in gaining insights into the dynamics and heat transfer of binary droplets impact on the hot substrate.