Coalescence-induced droplet jumping has the potential to enhance the performance of a variety of applications including condensation heat transfer, surface self-cleaning, anti-icing, and defrosting to name a few. Here, we study droplet jumping on hierarchical microgrooved and nanostructured smooth superhydrophobic surfaces. We show that the confined microgroove structures play a key role in tailoring droplet coalescence hydrodynamics, which in turn affects the droplet jumping velocity and energy conversion efficiency. We observed self-jumping of individual deformed droplets within microgrooves having maximum surface-to-kinetic energy conversion efficiency of 8%. Furthermore, various coalescence-induced jumping modes were observed on the hierarchical microgrooved superhydrophobic surface. The microgroove structure enabled high droplet jumping velocity (≈0.74U) and energy conversion efficiency (≈46%) by enabling the coalescence of deformed droplets in microgrooves with undeformed droplets on adjacent plateaus. The jumping velocity and energy conversion efficiency enhancements are 1.93× and 6.67× higher than traditional coalescence-induced droplet jumping on smooth superhydrophobic surfaces. This work not only demonstrates high droplet jumping velocity and energy conversion efficiency but also demonstrates the key role played by macroscale structures on coalescence hydrodynamics and elucidates a method to further control droplet jumping physics for a plethora of applications.

Nanostructure-enhanced pool and flow boiling has the potential to increase the efficiency of a plethora of applications. Past studies have developed well-ordered, nonscalable structures to study the fundamental limitations of boiling such as bubble nucleation, growth, and departure, often in a serial manner without global optimization. Here, we develop a highly scalable, conformal, cost-effective, rapid, and tunable three-tier hierarchical surface deposition technique capable of holistically creating micropores, microscale dendritic clusters, and nanoparticles on arbitrary surfaces. We use this technique to investigate the pool boiling heat transfer performance with focus on the bubble departure diameter and frequency. By tuning the structure length scale, the pool boiling characteristics were optimized through a multipronged approach, including increasing nucleation site density (micropores), regulating bubble evolution behavior (dendritic structures), improving surface wickability (nanoscale particles and channels), and separating liquid and vapor pathways (micropores and micro/nanochannels). Ultrahigh critical heat fluxes (CHF) ≈400 W/cm2 were obtained, corresponding to an enhancement of ≈245% compared to smooth copper surfaces. To study in situ bubble departure and coalescence dynamics, we developed and used high-magnification in-liquid endoscopy. Our work reveals the existence of a linear relationship between the bubble departure diameter/frequency near the onset of nucleate boiling and CHF enhancement. Our study not only develops a highly scalable, conformal, and rapid micro/nanostructuring technique, it outlines design guidelines for the holistic optimization of boiling heat transfer for energy and water applications.

Microchannel surfaces are common to microfluidics, biofluidics, thermal management, and energy applications. Due to processing limitations for the majority of metallic materials, the majority of hyperfine microchannels used in microfluidics and thermo‐fluids are fabricated on non‐metallic substrates, for example, silicon and polydimethylsiloxane. Here, a technique to fabricate ultrasmall microchannels on arbitrary metallic materials is developed using photolithography in combination with electrochemical deposition. The technique is used to prepare copper microchannels and to investigate the pool boiling heat transfer performance with a focus on the three‐phase contact line dynamics. The hydrodynamics of nucleating bubbles during boiling are observed in situ using in‐liquid endoscopy. The results show that the variation of critical heat flux enhancement has a linear relationship with the contact line increase ratio. The scalable microchannel surfaces exhibit superior heat transfer performance with a maximum heat transfer coefficient) enhancement of 930% with ultra‐low wall superheat of 5 °C. This work not only develops a scalable manufacturing method to develop ultra‐small microchannels on metallic materials, it outlines design guidelines for structure optimization of pool boiling heat transfer for temperature sensitive applications, such as electronics thermal management.

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Dropwise condensation represents the upper limit of thermal transport efficiency for liquid-to-vapor phase transition. A century of research has focused on promoting dropwise condensation by attempting to overcome limitations associated with thermal resistance and poor surface-modifier durability. Here, we show that condensation in a microscale gap formed by surfaces having a wetting contrast can overcome these limitations. Spontaneous out-of-plane condensate transfer between the contrasting parallel surfaces decouples the nanoscale nucleation behavior, droplet growth dynamics, and shedding processes to enable minimization of thermal resistance and elimination of surface modification. Experiments on pure steam combined with theoretical analysis and numerical simulation confirm the breaking of intrinsic limits to classical condensation and demonstrate a gap-dependent heat-transfer coefficient with up to 240% enhancement compared to dropwise condensation. Our study presents a promising mechanism and technology for compact energy and water applications where high, tunable, gravityindependent, and durable phase-change heat transfer is required.