Experimental Studies of Nanofluid Droplets in Spray Cooling

Spray cooling is used in cooling of electronic devices to remove large heat fluxes. Heat transfer to droplets impinging on a heated surface and boiling off has been studied. Most work is on a well-controlled system of a single drop falling onto a horizontal heated plate from a fixed height. These have revealed the droplet impingement mechanics to be a function largely of Weber number and excess temperature, and a range of regimes is observed similar to those in pool boiling, with a clearly identifiable critical heat flux. Nanofluids exhibit enhanced boiling heat transfer in pool boiling. The effect of nanoparticles on droplet boil-off was studied in this work. Nanofluid drops were let fall onto a surface at temperature greater than the saturation temperature, and behavior and heat flux were recorded and contrasted to that of a pure fluid. The working fluids used were pure water, ethanol, and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and ethanol- or DMSO-nanoparticle solutions (the nanoparticles were aluminum, with concentrations of up to 0.1% by weight in DMSO and 3.2% by weight in ethanol). High-speed photographic images of droplet evolution in time were obtained and indicate that there are differences in the behavior of nanofluid droplets as they boil off the surface, compared to pure fluids. Increasing nanoparticle concentration decreases the receding droplet breakup on rebound after impingement and appears to reduce the maximum spreading of a droplet as well. Maximum recoil height is reduced with increasing nanoparticle concentration. Experimental measurements of the heat fluxes associated with the pure and nanofluid droplets did not show significant enhancement, though there was noticeable improvement in the DMSO nanofluids.