The enhancement of dropwise and spray evaporative cooling by using extract of Reetha added water as a coolant

Abstract

Although the use of synthetic surfactant in various quenching process significantly enhances the heat removal rate, the corrosive nature of the synthetic surfactants and their interaction with the metal surface during cooling does not allow to use. The replacement of the synthetic surfactant by another surfactant which is free from the abovementioned disadvantages can mitigate the requirement of various industries dealing with high heat flux applications. In this regard, the literature does not reveal any information. Therefore, in the current work, an attempt has been made to replace the synthetic surfactant by preparing a surfactant which does not depict the disadvantage of the synthetic surfactant. In this work, the surfactant is prepared from the extract of Reetha (Sapindus mukorossi). The measurement of various physical properties of the extract of Reetha and also different characterizations such as FT-IR and EDX analysis confirm the existence of surfactant properties in the extract of Reetha. Furthermore, the corrosion analysis clearly indicates insignificant corrosion in comparison with synthetic surfactants. The post quenching analysis of the heat treated steel plate reveals that the extract of Reetha added water does not depict the deposition characteristics. The thermal performance of the extract of Reetha is determined by conducting dropwise evaporative cooling and spray quenching experiments. The result reveals that the extract of Reetha has an excellent heat removal capacity (CHF = 1.3 MW/m2) in the critical heat flux region.