Plasma Functionalized Wettability Gradient Surfaces for Electronic Cooling

In recent era, the growing requirements of miniaturization and weight reduction leads to remarkable thermal loads on small and sensitive electronic devices. This in turn inevitably necessitates the thermal management of electronic devices to enhance the energy efficiency and reliability of the complete systems. Several techniques are implemented for cooling of electronic devices; however, these methods have the drawback of lower heat transfer rates. In contrast, thermal management via spontaneous drop motion is an efficient passive cooling method. Recent progresses in surface technologies and material science facilitates fabricating wettability gradient on the surfaces. These surfaces enable self-propelled motion of liquid droplets at surprisingly high velocities, which also enhances the self-cleaning properties. However, drop dynamics on wettability gradient surface is yet not well understood and is of substantial scientific interest worldwide. Drop motion on wettability gradient surface is a complex phenomenon which involves asymmetric spreading on surface, directional retraction followed by detachment from a less wettable region and migration towards a more wettable region. In this background, the present work aims in the fabrication of wettability gradient surface for drop-based thermal management of electronic device using plasma-based coating method. In addition, experiments are performed on the graded surfaces to investigate the drop velocity on the wettability-graded surfaces.