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Updated: Dec 4, 2025

Fabrication of Superhydrophobic Metal Surfaces for Anti-Icing Applications
Published on: August 15, 2018
Freezing of Nanofluid Droplets on Superhydrophobic Surfaces
Xiaoyang Li1, Jie Yu1, Dinghua Hu1
1MIIT Key Laboratory of Thermal Control of Electronic Equipment, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China.
Abstract:
Droplet freezing on cold superhydrophobic surfaces has been studied extensively in recent years. However, previous works are mainly focused on studying water droplet freezing behavior; little work has been conducted to investigate the freezing dynamics of nanofluid droplets on superhydrophobic surfaces. In this work, freezing morphologies of water and nanofluid droplets on superhydrophobic surfaces with different roughnesses were compared and studied. The nanofluid droplets underwent a shape transition from spherical to flat plateau morphology, different from the frozen water droplets that exhibit a sharp cusp. The size of the flat plateau for the frozen nanofluid droplet increases with increasing nanoparticle concentration. The underlying mechanism of the morphology change during the freezing process was elucidated using COMSOL Multiphysics. Compared to the frozen water droplets, more air bubbles are trapped inside the frozen nanofluid droplets, which might be ascribed to the fast freezing speed of the nanofluid droplets. These results can provide important insights for many applications that require freezing of nanofluid droplets, such as material solidification, three-dimensional (3D) printing, as well as phase change enhancement.
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