Effect of Surface Wettability on Dropwise Condensation Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

Understanding the condensation mechanism is crucial to enhance the heat transfer performance of numerous industrial applications such as power generations, fog harvesting, water desalination, cooling of nuclear reactor, and thermal management of electronic device. In the present study, simulations are performed to investigate the effect of surface wettability on droplet growth dynamics during dropwise condensation. To simulate droplet growth dynamics involving phase change heat transfer, thermal lattice Boltzmann method has been employed with two distribution function for fluid and temperature field. Simulations performed in this work are used to analyze the effect of surface wettability on nucleation time and the evolution of average droplet radius, height, base diameter, and contact angle of the droplet. It is observed that nucleation time increases exponentially with the contact angle. The growth rate of droplet is higher for smaller droplets compared to larger droplets.