Condensation on Superhydrophobic Surfaces: The Role of Local Energy Barriers and Structure Length Scale
Name
Condensation on superhydrophobic surfaces - The role of local energy barriers and structure length-scale.pdf
Description
Main article, figures, and supplementary information
Size
5.6 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2dd46c27b18bfdb34fcf417cbb17cf36
Author(s)
Enright, Ryan
Miljkovic, Nenad
Thompson, Carl V.
Wang, Evelyn N.
Al-Obeidi, Ahmed F.
Date Issued
August 2012
Journal
Langmuir
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Citation
Enright, Ryan, Nenad Miljkovic, Ahmed Al-Obeidi, Carl V. Thompson, and Evelyn N. Wang. “Condensation on Superhydrophobic Surfaces: The Role of Local Energy Barriers and Structure Length Scale.” Langmuir 28, no. 40 (October 9, 2012): 14424-14432.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Water condensation on surfaces is a ubiquitous phase-change process that plays a crucial role in nature and across a range of industrial applications, including energy production, desalination, and environmental control. Nanotechnology has created opportunities to manipulate this process through the precise control of surface structure and chemistry, thus enabling the biomimicry of natural surfaces, such as the leaves of certain plant species, to realize superhydrophobic condensation. However, this “bottom-up” wetting process is inadequately described using typical global thermodynamic analyses and remains poorly understood. In this work, we elucidate, through imaging experiments on surfaces with structure length scales ranging from 100 nm to 10 μm and wetting physics, how local energy barriers are essential to understand non-equilibrium condensed droplet morphologies and demonstrate that overcoming these barriers via nucleation-mediated droplet–droplet interactions leads to the emergence of wetting states not predicted by scale-invariant global thermodynamic analysis. This mechanistic understanding offers insight into the role of surface-structure length scale, provides a quantitative basis for designing surfaces optimized for condensation in engineered systems, and promises insight into ice formation on surfaces that initiates with the condensation of subcooled water.
MIT Department
MIT Materials Research Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/la302599n
