A CFD assessment of Weber number impacts on dropwise condensation heat transfer for an individual droplet

Due to the high importance of Dropwise Condensation (DWC) in industry fields, it has attracted significant attention to itself during the last decades. Numerous researchers have been doing much effort to study the ways that may contribute to an amelioration in heat transfer rate in DWC. In this assessment, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis executed to assess the influence of the Weber number ([Formula: see text]) on the heat transfer between a liquid droplet and a flat solid surface. In this regard, to simulate the droplet's morphology, Surface Evolver (SE) was employed, and governing equations were processed through the use of the finite volume method (FVM) as well. Additionally, ANSYS FLUENT, a CFD solver, was utilized to calculate the average heat flux for diverse [Formula: see text] numbers, incorporating the influence of critical parameters such as saturation temperature, droplet size, and fluid properties. The results were also validated against available data and it showed acceptable agreement. The findings of this study demonstrate that increasing the [Formula: see text] number from 0.1 to 0.4 for a water droplet with a volume of 2 [Formula: see text] and a contact angle of [Formula: see text] leads to a 38.43% enhancement in average heat flux, indicating a significant improvement in thermal performance.