Deep Vision-Inspired Bubble Dynamics on Hybrid Nanowires with Dual Wettability

The boiling efficacy is intrinsically tethered to trade-offs between the desire for bubble nucleation and necessity of vapor removal. The solution to these competing demands requires the separation of bubble activity and liquid delivery, often achieved through surface engineering. In this study, we independently engineer bubble nucleation and departure mechanisms through the design of heterogeneous and segmented nanowires with dual wettability with the aim of pushing the limit of structure-enhanced boiling heat transfer performances. The demonstration of separating liquid and vapor pathways outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical nanowires, in particular, at low heat flux regimes while maintaining equal performances at high heat fluxes. A machine vision-based framework realizes the autonomous curation and extraction of hidden big data along with bubble dynamics. The combined efforts of materials design, deep learning techniques, and data-driven approach shed light on the mechanistic relationship between vapor/liquid pathways, bubble statistics, and phase change performance.