Nucleation and sliding growth of boiling bubbles on locally heated silicon surfaces

Highlights: • Nucleation pool boiling is studied experimentally on a locally heated substrate. • The bubble location is precisely measured by a High-speed infrared thermography. • The boundary of heater is found to greatly affect bubble dynamics. • Bubble sliding growth is observed on the locally heated substrate. • Sliding mechanism is explained by building a simple model. In this work, nucleate pool boiling is investigated experimentally on smooth monocrystalline silicon substrates with or without cavities. Different from the previous studies, the substrates are locally heated by an H-shaped titanium thin-film heater deposited on the back surface of the substrate. High-speed infrared thermography (HSIR) synchronized with high-speed video (HSV) is used to measure wall temperature evolutions and record bubble dynamic behaviors. On the basis of HSIR images, the variation of bubble locations on the wall is precisely located. The results show that the boundary of heater changes bubble dynamics significantly. For the first time, a very interesting bubble sliding from the nucleation site to the heater boundary is observed on the substrates with or without cavities. However, this phenomenon was never observed on infinitely larger heated substrates. The transient evolutions of wall temperature indicate that an asymmetric temperature profile occurs beneath the bubble due to bubble sliding. The asymmetric temperature profile is used to distinguish the sizes of microlayer and macrolayer. Finally, a simple model is proposed to explain the sliding mechanism.