Abstract
Thin film evaporation (TFE) plays an important role in many industrial applications, such as power generation, cooling, and thermal management. Effective evaporation takes place in the thin liquid film region with relatively low film thickness and low intermolecular forces. In this paper, a numerical approach based on the thermal lattice Boltzmann method (TLBM) is employed to investigate the heat and mass transfer phenomena in TFE. The TLBM approach is validated by simulating some benchmark problems, and is then used to study a vapor generation problem where TFE is involved. Specifically, vapor is generated from evaporating pores, the solid walls of which are hydrophilic. Factors that affect the overall vapor generation efficiency are investigated via the numerical approach. Methods that can improve the overall efficiency are further proposed. Simulations reveal that distributed scenarios (using distributed small pores instead of a big one) and hydrophobic pore ends render more efficient vapor generation.
Highlights
The fast development of microelectronic devices requires advanced thermal management.For devices with large heat flux such as integrated circuits and concentrator solar cells, highly efficient heat transfer approaches are desired
A thermal multiphase lattice Boltzmann model with normalized Van der Waals equation of states (EOS) was developed in this paper to simulate heat and mass transfer in thin film evaporation (TFE)
One contribution of this paper is that it shows that thermal lattice Boltzmann method (TLBM) can provide details of the liquid-vapor interface in TFE, for example, the maximal mass flux is achieved in the thin liquid film region
Summary
The fast development of microelectronic devices requires advanced thermal management. Since TFE is usually considered in micro-scale and even nano-scale devices, measuring the physical quantities, such as the thickness of liquid film and the local temperature, via experimental methods is challenging. In our study of TFE, LBM is mainly considered, which is a mesoscopic computational fluid dynamics approach. We will show that LBM, and thermal LBM (TLBM), can reproduce several important phenomena in TFE, even without very fine mesh grids It facilitates our understanding of the physics behind TFE and further device-level design. Reported results on TFE at a hydrophilic microstructured surface using a double distribution TLBM approach. By introducing some flow and thermal boundary conditions, the proposed method is further applied in the investigation of a practical problem, which is direct vapor generation. Before presenting the main results, the TLBM approach together with some validations are discussed first
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