Successive droplet impingement onto heated surfaces of different wettabilities

Abstract

New high-performance electronic components generate a massive amount of heat per unit of area, and spray cooling is a field of interest for this application. Spray cooling achieves higher heat transfer coefficients than commonly used forced air convection cooling systems. In this study, we performed multiple droplet impingement experiments over heated surfaces in the non-boiling regime, a scenario that is closer to the phenomena of spray cooling than individual droplet impact. This paper focuses on the effects of droplet interactions with surfaces exhibiting distinct wettabilities. A surface thermocouple was used concomitantly as the impact surface and the temperature sensor. The surface thermocouple was originally hydrophilic (uncoated), which later we treated with a low cost commercial superhydrophobic coating (coated). High-speed imaging showed the droplet motion during impact. We proposed a one-dimensional inverse heat conduction semi-analytical solution, adopting a time-dependent droplet heat flux as one of the boundary conditions to represent the droplet cooling effect. We compared the heat transfer performances of both uncoated and coated surfaces for different droplet velocities but same initial temperature. The results showed higher heat transfer rates on uncoated surface relative to the coated one. Also, higher droplet velocities showed higher heat transfer mainly due to the increase in the droplet spreading diameter in contact with the solid. Successive droplets showed lower heat flow for the uncoated surface because of the low thermal effusivity and thickness of the heated solid, where most of the heat is removed by the first droplet. The first droplet thermal resistance and damping effects for the subsequent droplets, reduced the overall cooling performance. On the other hand, for the coated surface we found that the consecutive droplets continued to transfer heat with a similar rate as the previous one, which is desirable for spray cooling. However, the reduced overall heat transfer performance for the coated surface can be explained by the air pockets within the coating structure.