Antoine Parthoens : frost formation on hydrophobic surfaces for refrigeration applications

Summary :

Frost accretion in heat exchangers of refrigeration systems is a major issue involving energy consumption penalty in the heating or cooling devices. Numerous studies try to suppress, or at least delay, this frost formation. Among them, the use of (super-)hydrophobic coatings has shown encouraging results. The present thesis aims at investigating one step further the use of such materials in a heat pump evaporator.

A parallel approach is driven between the characterization of a heat pump evaporator and the study of simple surfaces showing hydrophobic characteristics. For both of them, experimental as well as numerical aspects are studied. After a model validation at the different scales, a model fusion is realized to show the performance improvement of this kind of machines, thanks to hydrophobic coatings.   

Supervisor :

Vincent Lemort , Professor