Biologically inspired porous cooling membrane using arrayed-droplets evaporation

摘要

Inspired by human skin that dissipates heat via sweat-droplet evaporation on the skin, we propose an evaporative cooling technique via arrayed-droplets on a porous membrane, construct an analytical model of the evaporative cooling including interactions among the large number of droplets, and extensively analyze the cooling performance of 1000-droplet array. Our model shows that heat dissipation is enhanced by the membrane with dense droplets (i.e., enhancement factor of 10 at 5000 pores/cm~2 and pore radius of 35 μm with respect to human skin). Additionally, the model predicts that the membrane dissipates heat more efficiently by operating at a higher temperature (i.e., additional enhancement factor of 17 at droplet temperature of 100℃).