Aluminum Micropillar Surfaces with Hierarchical Micro- and Nanoscale Features for Enhancement of Boiling Heat Transfer Coefficient and Critical Heat Flux

The rapid progress of electronic devices has necessitated efficient heat dissipation within boiling cooling systems, underscoring the need for improvements in boiling heat transfer coefficient (HTC) and critical heat flux (CHF). While different approaches for micropillar fabrication on copper or silicon substrates have been developed and have shown significant boiling performance improvements, such enhancement approaches on aluminum surfaces are not broadly investigated, despite their industrial applicability. This study introduces a scalable approach to engineering hierarchical micro-nano structures on aluminum surfaces, aiming to simultaneously increase HTC and CHF. One set of samples was produced using a combination of nanosecond laser texturing and chemical etching in hydrochloric acid, while another set underwent an additional laser texturing step. Three distinct micropillar patterns were tested under saturated pool boiling conditions using water at atmospheric pressure. Our findings reveal that microcavities created atop pillars successfully facilitate nucleation and micropillars representing nucleation site areas on a microscale, leading to an enhanced HTC up to 242 kW m-2 K-1. At the same time, the combination of the surrounding hydrophilic porous area enables increased wicking and pillar patterning, defining the vapor-liquid pathways on a macroscale, which leads to an increase in CHF of up to 2609 kW m-2.