Enhanced Boiling of a Dielectric Liquid on Copper Nanowire Surfaces

Copper nanowire arrays on a silicon (Si) substrate were fabricated by electro-chemical deposition through an anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) template to generate a high performance boiling surface. In this study, the pitch (~300 nm) and diameter (~200 nm) of the nanowires were fixed, and the height was varied between 1 and 8 μm. It is observed that copper nanowire surfaces increase the critical heat flux and reduce the incipience superheat compared to the baseline experiments, which were performed using a plain surface without nanowires. The work reported here is a major enhancement over previous studies on structured surfaces, which mainly considered structures which were on the order of 100 μm.