Boiling heat transfer enhancement via textured surfaces with optimal cavities

The development of efficient cooling-heating devices is a crucial task in several applications such as microelectronics and aerospace engineering. The rapid growth of electronic technologies and the rapid decrease in component size have led to a strong need for thermal packaging and management. Unfortunately, today's use of strong power density is coupled to a lack of efficient heat dissipation methods leading to a truly technological bottleneck. Therefore, understanding the transport phenomena involved in micro heat transfer and their enhancement is definitely needed to allow the further technological miniaturization step. Techniques to enhance heat transfer between a fluid and a solid surface are based both on the use of more performant fluids or by functionalizing the surface using increasing roughness or adding fins or special textures. Thanks to the new manufacturing technologies, relatively large textured surfaces have become a reality in recent times. Nevertheless, their use for heat transfer enhancement is still poorly investigated. The use of micro/nano-structured surfaces associated with the local characterisation of the wall surface temperature and the visualisation of the two-phase flow behaviour is necessary to improve our knowledge of the basic mechanisms and their modelling. This will fill the current knowledge gap, which is related on the one hand to the absence of reliable boiling models that take into account micro-scale phenomena, and, on the other hand, to the lack of predictive tools for the flow boiling enhancement obtained using these surfaces. In this framework, my Research Project's scope is to study the impact of micro/nanostructured surfaces on the heat transfer enhancement in subcooled nucleate flow boiling. This will not only allow to extend the actual knowledge on heat transfer enhancement by surface modification but also provide benchmark cases for the development and validation of theoretical models.