Biomimetic Micropillar Wick for Enhanced Thin-Film Evaporation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biomimetic micropillar wick inspired by Nepenthes alata that significantly enhances thin-film evaporation, increasing dryout heat flux by approximately 234% and improving heat transfer efficiency.

Contribution

The study presents a novel biomimetic wick design with wedge-shaped micropillars, validated through numerical modeling, demonstrating substantial improvements over conventional cylindrical wicks.

Findings

234% increase in dryout heat flux

Higher effective heat transfer coefficient

Enhanced capillary pumping and permeability

Abstract

Sustainable liquid cooling solutions are recognized as the future of thermal management in the chip industry. Among them, the phase change heat transfer devices such as heat pipes and vapour chambers have shown tremendous potential. These devices rely on the physics of capillary-driven thin-film evaporation which is inherently coupled with the design and optimization of the evaporator wicks used in these devices. Here, we introduce a biomimetic evaporator wick design inspired by the peristome of the Nepenthes alata that can achieve significantly enhanced evaporative cooling. It consists of array of micropillars with multiple wedges along the sidewall of each micropillar. The efficacy of the wedged micropillar is evaluated based on a validated numerical model on the metrics of dryout heat flux and effective heat transfer coefficient. The wedge angle is chosen such that wedged micropillars cause liquid filaments to rise along the micropillar vertical walls. This results in a significant increase in thin-film area for evaporation. Additionally, the large mean curvature of the liquid meniscus produces strong capillary pumping pressure and simultaneously, the wedges increase the overall permeability of the wick. Consequently, our model predicts that the wedged micropillar wick can attain ~234% enhancement of dryout heat flux compared to a conventional cylindrical micropillar wick of similar geometrical dimensions. Moreover, the wedged micropillars can also attain higher effective heat transfer coefficient under dryout conditions thus outperforming the cylindrical micropillar in terms of heat transfer efficiency. Our study provide insight into the design and capability of the biomimetic wedged micropillars as an efficient evaporator wick for various thin-film evaporation applications.