Experiments and Modeling of a Liquid Droplet Transported by a Gas Stream Impinging on a Heated Surface: Evaporative Regime Available to Purchase

Understanding the transport mechanisms involved in a single droplet impinging on a heated surface is imperative to the complete understanding of droplet and spray cooling. Evidence in the literature suggests that gas assisted sprays and mist flows are more efficient than sprays consisting only of liquid droplets. There has been few if any fundamental studies on gas-assisted droplets or spray cooling, in which a carrier gas or vapor stream propels the droplet to the target surface. The current work extends previous studies of a droplet impinging on a heated surface conducted by the same group from the single phase regime into the evaporative regime. For both regimes, understanding the transport physics due to the heat transfer from the heated surface to the droplet and then by convection and evaporation to the airflow is of fundamental importance. High-speed photography was used to capture the spreading process and yielded results that correlated well with previously published isothermal and single-phase results. The heat transfer was measured with a fitting approach by which the instantaneous temperature profile was matched to an analytic solution to determine the instantaneous value of the centerline heat transfer coefficient. A very large increase in the heat dissipation was observed when compared to previously published single-phase results. Heat transfer was optimized at Reynolds numbers that produced an optimally thin liquid film and high heat and mass transfer coefficients on the surface of the film.