Do surfaces with mixed hydrophilic and hydrophobic areas enhance pool boiling?

The phase change heat transfer is a lucrative process to exchange a large amount of heat. Therefore, phase
change heat transfer is selected in many industrial applications, such as during thermal generation of
electricity, desalination, metallurgy, electronics cooling, and food processing. Boiling is one of the
efficient phase change heat transfer method to remove or transfer a large amount of heating load
attributed to the large amount of heat of vaporization involved in the process. There are two types of
boiling process: (i) flow boiling, associated with flow of liquid along hot surface and (ii) pool boiling,
associated with heating of a stagnant pool of liquid. Pool boiling heat transfer is divided into four regions:
(a) free convection boiling (b) nucleate boiling (c) transition boiling and (d) film boiling. Nucleate boiling
region is a matter of interest among the researcher as it is the most effective heat transfer region where
bubble generation, and its growth on and withdrawal from a heating surface repeatedly occur, resulting in
lower surface temperature. There are several methodologies have been proposed to enhance nucleate pool
boiling heat transfer and among them the two foremost methodologies are (i) modification of fluid or
operating condition i.e. saturation pressure and surface tension and (ii) modification of heating surface in
macro, micro, nano and hybrid scale. These modification of surfaces at different scales are achieved by
increasing heat transfer area, increasing nucleation site density, and enhancing wettability of the surface.
Wettability describes the spreading of liquid on a surface. When contact angle between liquid and
surface is less than 90° the surface is called wetting or in case of water hydrophilic and when greater than
90° the surface is non-wetting or in case of water hydrophobic. The common mistake is wettability is a
unique property of a surface but in actuality the effect of wettability on surface is a complex phenomenon
as hydrophobic zones promotes onset of nucleate boiling (ONB) whereas hydrophilic surface reduces the
resistance of rewetting giving continuous supply of liquid to the nucleation site thus enhances critical heat
flux (CHF), operating limit of boiling. But a surface possessing both the attributes of hydrophilicity and
hydrophobicity enhances boiling heat transfer further. Betz et al. [1] manufactured surface combining
hydrophilic and hydrophobic zones by Teflon pattern on silicon wafer using photolithography. They have
found that all the patterned surfaces enhance the CHF by 65% over un-patterned surface but hydrophobic
networks (hydrophobic pattern over hydrophilic surface) show lower CHF than hydrophilic network
(hydrophilic zone on hydrophobic surface). Hydrophilic network shows 100% enhancement of heat
transfer coefficient (HTC) than plain surface. The enhancement of HTC on patterned surface is explained
by the increase in number of nucleation site. The increase of HTC in hydrophobic network than
hydrophilic network is explained by larger hydrophobic area resulting more nucleation sites and the
constant distance between the nucleation sites which diminishes the instabilities.
Jo et al. [2] used hydrophilic silica (SiO 2) coating and hydrophobic Teflon coating on silicon
substrates to investigated the effects of surface wettability on pool boiling performance. It was found that
hydrophobic surface experience very short convective region and ONB occurred at 1–2 K wall superheat
—much earlier than hydrophilic surface. In low heat flux the heat transfer performance of entire
hydrophobic surface was found to be much better than entire hydrophilic surface. It was also observed
that heterogeneous surface composed of hydrophobic dots on a hydrophilic surface provided better
nucleate boiling performance than either homogeneous hydrophilic or homogeneous hydrophobic
surfaces. But CHF for the heterogeneous surface was almost identical to that for the homogeneous
hydrophilic surface. The effect of pitch distance on boiling is found to be more dominant than number of
dots on boiling heat transfer. Follow-up study by Jo et al. [3] found that increasing area ratio of
hydrophobic dots to heating surface decreased CHF for water without influencing the nucleate boiling
heat transfer coefficient. The possible reasons are hydrophobic dots are constantly covered with vapor
bubble and increase of ONB with increase in dot diameter. Based on this finding, they proposed a variety
of surfaces having micro-sized hydrophobic dots with small area ratio. Jo et al. [4] used photoresist
lithography and dry etching to form a hydrophilic self-assembled monolayer pattern atop surface micro-
pins, in which contact angle on the patterns was larger than on the plain surface, and demonstrated
effectiveness of this technique at separating vapor and liquid paths during vigorous boiling, thereby
improving nucleate boiling performance in water, but without affecting CHF.
Choi et al. [5] reported a novel method for engineering hybrid-wettability surface by first printing
hydrophobic polymer dot arrays with 110° contact angle on stainless steel substrate, followed by
hydrophilic ZnO nanostructure with 20° contact angle, which was formed using a microreactor-assisted
nanomaterial deposition process. This surface achieved three-fold improvement in nucleate boiling heat
transfer coefficient for water.
From this review it has been found that the combining both hydrophilic and hydrophobic surface
has profound effect on nucleate boiling heat transfer than the separate wettability surfaces. But further
scope of improvement is there in this topic as fabrication method of hydrophobic dot pattern on large
surface area has not yet been done and optimization of dot geometry can be done.