Jumping-droplet-enhanced condensation on scalable superhydrophobic nanostructured surfaces.

By Nenad Miljkovic, Ryan Enright, Y. Nam, K. Lopez, Nicholas G Dou, Jean H. Sack, Evelyn Wang. Nano letters (Print), 2012

1,090 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When droplets coalesce on a superhydrophobic nanostructured surface, the resulting droplet can jump from the surface due to the release of excess surface energy. If designed properly, these superhydrophobic nanostructured surfaces can not only allow for easy droplet removal at micrometric length scales during condensation but also promise to enhance heat transfer performance. However, the rationale for the design of an ideal nanostructured surface as well as heat transfer experiments demonstrating the advantage of this jumping behavior are lacking. Here, we show that silanized copper oxide surfaces created via a simple fabrication method can achieve highly efficient jumping-droplet condensation heat transfer. We experimentally demonstrated a 25% higher overall heat flux and 30% higher condensation heat transfer coefficient compared to state-of-the-art hydrophobic condensing surfaces at low supersaturations (<1.12). This work not only shows significant condensation heat transfer enhancement but also promises a low cost and scalable approach to increase efficiency for applications such as atmospheric water harvesting and dehumidification. Furthermore, the results offer insights and an avenue to achieve high flux superhydrophobic condensation.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b594c9f76959654ee2317fdd378f0aaf68d99faa

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In Computational Mechanics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Surfaces, Coatings and Films

Citations in the corpus

Numerical simulations of self-propelled jumping upon drop coalescence on non-wetting surfaces (2014, background): “…or self-cleaning (Wisdom et al. 2013), as well as heat transfer systems that enhance dropwise condensation (Chen et al. 2007; Dietz et al. 2010; Cheng, Vandadi & Chen 2012; He et al. 2012; Miljkovic et al. 2013) and promote thermal rectification (Boreyko, Zhao & Chen 2011; Boreyko & Chen 2013).”
Design of anti-icing surfaces: smooth, textured or slippery? (2016, neutral): “Under high supersaturation conditions, the droplet nucleation density can increase to the point where interactions between adjacent droplets occur on a similar length scale to the nanostructure spacing, causing the eventual formation of pinned liquid films 117 .”