Abstract
With an escalating need to find ways to reduce the water consumption in industrial cooling system, on-demand hybrid cooling has been a topic of great interest. The main concept of this cooling method is centered upon the utilization of huge exchange of enthalpy associated with phase change process in a conventional convective cooling system. In this study, a multidimensional multi-physics model has been employed to study a system that undergoes this dual mode cooling process where both convection and evaporation contribute to the heat transfer process. The computational domain considered is comprised of a thin liquid film that undergoes evaporation with constant heat flux provided from the bottom and a convective loading of laminar air flow above it. Evaporation takes place at the liquid-gas interface and the evaporated mass is being carried away by the incoming air, hence augmenting the convective cooling through the phase change process. This is an extension of our prior work where the surface structure modification (i.e. undulated surface) on the performance of this proposed hybrid cooling method is numerically investigated. Array of hemispherical structures have been introduced as the surface introducing the heat flux to the liquid film. The objective is to increase the surface to volume ratio and decrease the thermal resistance across the liquid film. The predictions indicate that with the increase in the height of the undulated surface the thermal resistance across the liquid film tends to decrease. Results from these simulations show that a ∼50% reduction in the thermal resistance can be achieved by the surface structure modification while the net evaporation flux can be doubled compared to a flat film configuration.