High Heat Flux With Small Scale Monodisperse Sprays

Abstract

This work is aimed at cooling small surfaces (1.3 mm × 2 mm and 3 mm × 5 mm) using spray from thermal ink jet (TIJ) atomizers. Particular interests in this work include obtaining heat fluxes near the critical heat flux (CHF), understanding the correlation between the heat dissipation efficiency (η) and the liquid film thickness (δ) through experimental data, and understanding the primary mode of heat transfer on spray cooling at different liquid film thickness. Current experimental results indicate that high heat fluxes (∼4 × 107 W/m2) are obtained for controlled conditions of cooling mass flow rate, higher efficiencies are achieved at smaller liquid film thickness (δ ≈ 5 μm → η ≈ 0.9), and the heat transfer by conduction through the film becomes dominant as δ decreases.