Volume 19: Sustainable Energy Solutions for a Post-COVID Recovery towards a Better Future: Part II

The influencing mechanism of surface wettability on convective heat transfer in copper nanochannel Shuting Yao, Jiansheng Wang, Xueling Liu

Abstract

Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation is employed to probe the convective heat transfer of water flowing through a nanochannel. The wall-fluid interaction is considered as different values to characterize nanochannel wall with various surface wettability. The atomic microstructure, flow behavior and heat transfer characteristics are investigated. The results show that wall-fluid interaction plays an important role in interfacial fluid structure, density distribution, velocity slip, velocity distribution and temperature distribution as well as interfacial heat transfer. Adjusting the surface wettability of nanochannel wall will bring a significant impact on the heat transfer performance and flow properties. The increase of wall-fluid interaction enhances the first peak value of density and the main peak value of static structure factor. Thus, the interface velocity slip decreases, which is not beneficial to the reduction of flow resistance. In contrast, the nanochannel wall with the strong wall-fluid interaction is more similar to hydrophilic surface, and the heat transfer performance is better.

Keywords nanochannel, surface wettability, water flow, heat transfer, molecular dynamics