Guidelines for Designing Micropillar Structures for Enhanced Evaporative Heat Transfer

Abstract

Over the last several decades, cooling technologies have been developed to address the growing thermal challenges associated with high-powered electronics. However, within the next several years, the heat generated by these devices is predicted to exceed 1 kW/cm2, and traditional methods, such as air cooling, are limited in their capacities to dissipate such high heat fluxes. In contrast, two-phase cooling methods, such as microdroplet evaporation, are very promising due to the large latent heat of vaporization associated with the phase change process. Previous studies have shown non-axisymmetric droplets exhibit different evaporation characteristics than spherical droplets. For a droplet pinned atop a micropillar, the solid-liquid and liquid-vapor interfacial area, the volume, and thickness of the droplet are the major factors that govern the evaporation heat transport process. In this work, we develop a shape optimization tool using the particle swarm optimization algorithm to maximize evaporation from a droplet confined atop a micropillar. The tool is used to optimize the shape of a nonaxisymmetric droplet. Compared to droplets atop circular and regular equilateral triangular micropillar structures, we find that droplets confined on pseudo-triangular micropillar structures have 23.7% and 5.7% higher heat transfer coefficients, respectively. The results of this work will advance the design of microstructures that support droplets with maximum heat transfer performance.