An Ultrathin Nanoporous Membrane Evaporator
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An ultrathin nanoporous.pdf
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Author(s)
Kinefuchi, Ikuya
Lu, Zhengmao
Wilke, Kyle L.
Preston, Daniel John
Chang-Davidson, Elizabeth F.
Wang, Evelyn
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Nano Letters
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Citation
Lu, Zhengmao et al. “An Ultrathin Nanoporous Membrane Evaporator.” Nano Letters 17, 10 (September 2017): 6217–6220 © 2017 American Chemical Society
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Evaporation is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in nature and widely used in industry. Yet a fundamental understanding of interfacial transport during evaporation remains limited to date owing to the difficulty of characterizing the heat and mass transfer at the interface, especially at high heat fluxes (>100 W/cm²). In this work, we elucidated evaporation into an air ambient with an ultrathin (≈200 nm thick) nanoporous (≈130 nm pore diameter) membrane. With our evaporator design, we accurately monitored the temperature of the liquid–vapor interface, reduced the thermal–fluidic transport resistance, and mitigated the clogging risk associated with contamination. At a steady state, we demonstrated heat fluxes of ≈500 W/cm² across the interface over a total evaporation area of 0.20 mm². In the high flux regime, we showed the importance of convective transport caused by evaporation itself and that Fick’s first law of diffusion no longer applies. This work improves our fundamental understanding of evaporation and paves the way for high flux phase-change devices. Keywords: evaporation; high flux; Maxwell−Stefan equation; nanoporous; Ultrathin
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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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.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b02889
