Enhancement of Thermal Bubble Nucleation From Micro Cavity Filled With Porous Materials Available to Purchase

In many applications, the study of nucleation of thermal bubble is requisite for design of micro geometry such as micro-actuator, chip cooling system and ink-jet device operation and so on. In heterogeneous nucleation boiling, a bubble generally initiated from a small gas trapped cavity on heated surface. Experimental observations were undertaken on the bubble generation phenomena from fabricated micro-cavity on the silicon wafer, which is immersed in FC-72. Especially, the nucleation of thermal bubble is much enhanced in the case of the cavity filled with porous material compared to vacant cavity. Incipience boiling occurs much less degree of superheat, which is the difference of surface temperature and bulk fluid temperature. It is also observed that the generated bubble size and frequency are dependent on the specifications of cavities. In this study, we performed various experiments to minimize the degree of superheat and to generate specific bubble size and purposed frequency by modification of cavity size and filling porous materials.