Capillary-Driven Boiling Heat Transfer on Superwetting Microgrooves

[Image: see text] Boiling can transfer a vast amount of heat and thereby is widely used for cooling advanced systems with high power density. However, the capillary force of most existing wicks is insufficient to surpass the liquid replenishing resistance for high-efficient boiling. Herein, we report a new microgroove wick on high-conductive copper substrates that was constructed via ultraviolet nanosecond pulsed laser milling. The phase explosion, combined with melting and resolidification effects of laser milling induces dense microcavities with sizes around several micrometers on the microgroove surface. The hierarchical microstructures significantly improve the wettability of the microgroove wicks to obtain strong capillary and meanwhile provide abundant effective nucleation sites. The boiling heat transfer in a visualized flat heat pipe shows that the new wicks enable sustainable liquid replenishing even under antigravity conditions, thus resulting in maximum 33-fold improvement of equivalent thermal conductivity when compared with the copper base. This research provides both scientific and technical bases for the design and manufacture of high-performance phase change cooling devices.