Spray cooling is a highly effective method of heat removal that has broad practical applications, including use in modern cooling systems designed for microelectronics and microchips. It is known that spray cooling performance is influenced by a huge number of factors. This experimental research is devoted to the study of the influence of a liquid flow rate in the range of 15.1–24.2 cm³/s, heat flux up to 6.4 MW/m², and nozzle-to-surface distance on the heat transfer rate in non-boiling mode and the distribution of the local temperature of the heat exchange surface during spray cooling. It is shown that the heat transfer coefficient weakly depends on the heat flux for all studied nozzle-to-surface distances. It is demonstrated that the nozzle-to-surface distance has a significant influence on the heat transfer and the temperature distributionon the heating surface during spray cooling in non-boiling mode. At the same time, there is an optimal distance at which the maximum heat transfer rate and uniformity of the temperature are achieved. Criteria and a ratio for determining the optimal distance from the spray nozzle to the heated surface are proposed.

The spreading of the water droplets falling on surfaces with a contact angle from 0 to 160° was investigated in this work. Superhydrophilicity of the surface is achieved by laser treatment, and hydrophobization is then achieved by applying a fluoropolymer coating of different thicknesses. The chosen approach makes it possible to obtain surfaces with different wettability, but with the same morphology. The parameter t* corresponding to the time when the capillary wave reaches the droplet apex is established. It is shown that for earlier time moments, the droplet height change does not depend on the type of used substrate. A comparison with the data of other authors is made and it is shown that the motion of the contact line on the surface weakly depends on the type of the used structure if its characteristic size is less than 10 μm.

Research in the field of the evaporation of liquid droplets placed on surfaces with special wetting properties such as biphilic surfaces is of great importance. This paper presents the results of an experimental study of the heat and mass transfer of a water droplet during its evaporation depending on the direction of the gravitational force. A special technique was developed to create unique substrates, which were used to physically simulate the interaction of liquid droplets with the surface at any angle of inclination to the horizontal. It was found that the suspended and sessile droplets exhibited fundamentally different evaporation dynamics. It was shown that the suspended droplets had a higher temperature and, at the same time, evaporated almost 30% faster.

This paper demonstrates the advantages and prospects of transparent design of the heating surface for the simultaneous study of the hydrodynamic and thermal characteristics of spray cooling. It was shown that the high-speed recording from the reverse side of such heater allows to identify individual droplets before their impact on the forming liquid film, which makes it possible to measure their sizes with high spatial resolution. In addition, such format enables one to estimate the number of droplets falling onto the impact surface and to study the features of the interface evolution during the droplets’ impacts. In particular, the experiments showed various possible scenarios for this interaction, such as the formation of small-scale capillary waves during impacts of small droplets, as well as the appearance of “craters” and splashing crowns in the case of large ones. Moreover, the unsteady temperature field during spray cooling in regimes without boiling was investigated using high-speed infrared thermography. Based on the obtained data, the intensity of heat transfer during spray cooling for various liquid flow rates and heat fluxes was analyzed. It was shown that, for the studied regimes, the heat transfer coefficient weakly depends on the heat flux density and is primarily determined by the flow rate. In addition, the comparison of the processes of spray cooling and nucleate boiling was made, and an analogy was shown in the mechanisms that determine their intensity of heat transfer.