Spray cooling of micropillared steel plates: Two-stage quenching phenomenon

Abstract

Abstract Spray cooling is a crucial process of steel manufacturing, nuclear power plants and electronics thermal management. However, its precise control is challenging due to the various boiling regimes involved at different temperature levels. Transition from film boiling to nucleate boiling, namely, the onset of quench is our particular interest as it remarks the thermal history of the hot object. Based on our previous findings that quench occurs at a specific temperature defined at the droplet-surface interface we demonstrate that micropillars on steel plates can increase the quench temperature Tq . We performed water spray cooling tests with stainless-steel samples, on which various configurations of micropillars were fabricated using laser texturing. Interestingly, we observed two stages of quench for a specific sample: a drastic increase in the cooling rate at ca. 450 °C, followed by another increase at ca. 250 °C. The first cooling rate increase is attributed to the initiation of stable liquid-solid contact at the pillar tops. Eventually, water wets the entire pillars and the bottom surface, further increasing the cooling rate. Samples with higher pillars showed no film boiling regime in the experiment, implying higher quenching temperature (Tq > 600 °C). We attribute the increased apparent Tq to the narrow heat conduction path within the micropillar, resulting in a significant temperature drop at the tip which enhances liquid-solid contact.