How surfactant mass transfer can be used to control the boiling crisis

In numerous industrial and domestic applications, two-phase heat transfer processes are essential for power generation and thermal management. As such, boiling is a commonly used phase-change process in several applications to transport vast amounts of heat from liquid to vapor interfaces. In some cases, those applications undergo localized overheating of the heating surface which is known as the boiling crisis where bubbles have coalesced into an insulating film. Recent findings have led to improvements in boiling performance with the use of surface-active agents, but are limited to smaller concentration range values at high heat fluxes compared to this study. Here, we investigate how the boiling crisis changes on a gold heating surface when surfactants are added over a wide concentration range for optimal heat transfer enhancement. We hypothesize that boiling enhancement still exists in a unified concentration range even at high heat flux intervals where the boiling crisis is observed, irrespective of surfactant type due to our recent work elucidating how mass transfer and dynamic adsorption control ebullition. The findings of this work could provide a broader understanding of how surfactants affect boiling performance at elevated surface temperature conditions.