Event Date/Time
Location
Maeder Hall
Series/Event Type
Advanced condenser surfaces with micro- and nanoscale wettability patterns have attracted much attention recently due to their potential to significantly increase performance in water harvesting and thermal management applications. Performance in these systems is measured in terms of the condensation rate, which is dictated not only by vapor-to-liquid phase change processes but also by the transport of condensed liquid droplets along the condenser surface. Computational fluid dynamics modeling offers a pathway to design surface patterns that optimize condensation rates, but few studies have considered the complexities of condensation and liquid transport on patterned surfaces simultaneously. Interfacial mobility and mass accommodation coefficient, two parameters that quantify how readily liquid-vapor interfaces move and how easily vapor phase atoms stick to droplets, are needed for CFD modeling of simultaneous condensation and fluid flow. However, there is significant uncertainty in the values of these parameters in the vicinity of micro- and nanopatterned surfaces, which tend to produce very small droplets. In this talk, I will describe my group’s recent efforts to obtain these parameters from analysis of atomistic transport processes. Specifically, I will present a robust new computational method we developed to compute liquid-vapor interfacial mobilities and discuss our calculations of drop size dependent accommodation coefficients.