Collaborative Research: Investigation of Anomalous Transport Phenomena During Evaporation from Nano-Engineered Surfaces

This project focuses on transport phenomena leading to unexpectedly high evaporative fluxes at nano-engineered surfaces such as nanoporous membranes and nanofin surfaces. Design and optimization of such surfaces is important for diverse thermal management applications from electronics cooling to defense, including profound social and health impacts related to the use of high-powered wearable and portable electronic devices.

The project also contains educational and outreach components, such as “Touching Nano”, an interactive software that will interface real-time molecular dynamics simulation data with a haptic force feedback device to teach size and scale effects in nano-transport to school children, undergraduate and graduate students.

The key objectives of the proposed work include (i) bridging the gap between the recent experimental results on evaporation in nanostructured surfaces and theory of thin film evaporation by quantification of interfacial transport from surface adsorbed layers and revision of the conventional thin film evaporation models; (ii) Utilization of two independent (bottom-up and top-down) numerical modeling approaches and validation of their predictions by leveraging experiments conducted using high-speed and high-resolution measurements. Novel development and testing protocols will be implemented using an experimental platform by integrating Surface Plasmon Resonance and confocal scanning microscopy techniques to measure the transient evaporation mass flux along with high-density temperature nano-sensor arrays for local temperature measurements; (iii) Design and optimization of nanofin and nanoporous surfaces for enabling the highest possible rates of heat transfer.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.