Homogenizing interfacial evaporation cooling by Turing-pattern mediated anisotropic architecture with enhanced water efficiency

Abstract

Interfacial evaporation cooling holds significant promise for thermal management of photovoltaic panels and various thermal functional devices. However, the isotropic architecture of conventional evaporators often hinders even water delivery and targeted heat extraction, resulting in non-uniform cooling, which further leads to hotspot generation and extra feedwater consumption. Herein, we propose an anisotropic interfacial evaporator mediated by Turing hydrodynamics, which is readily demonstrated by fabricating CuO nanostructures with generative Turing patterns. The as-designed Turing-patterned capillary networks (TCNs) leverage the inherent instability-driven patterning mechanism to construct orientable microchannels, which spontaneously steer water flow by reconfiguring the pressure and velocity fields within the microchannels for directional capillary spreading with enhanced heat transfer across the entire heating surface, thereby achieving uniform interfacial evaporation and homogenizing the surface temperature field. Under 1-sun solar heat input, the TCN evaporator's surface is, on average, 3 °C cooler than that of the isotropic fibrous cooling pad, and the surface temperature inhomogeneity is suppressed to below 0.5 °C. The TCN evaporator not only improves energy efficiency by 13.7% compared to the fibrous evaporator, but also consumes 21.7% less water supply to achieve the same cooling capacity. The economic viability for photovoltaic thermal management by the TCN is also discussed in detail. This work provides a feasible paradigm for the rational design of high-efficiency evaporators by combining generative geometry-adaptive morphogenesis with interface engineering, offering new insights into the development of interfacial evaporation cooling with enhanced water utilization.