Experimental investigation of the electro-de-wetting effect on the regulation of pool boiling behavior

Effective boiling control is crucial for the thermal management in high-power electronics. Conventional passive methods lack adaptability while active electric field approaches often require high voltages or engineered surfaces. This study presents a low-voltage (<5 V) electrostatic strategy based on the electro-de-wetting (EDW) effect, using a low-concentration cationic surfactant solution and a common conductive surface. Without specialized substrates, by leveraging electric-field-driven surfactant migration and adsorption, the dynamic regulation of nucleation site density and surface temperature was achieved, reducing the heat flux required for the onset of nucleate boiling by approximately 50 % via enhanced surface hydrophobicity. The discovery of unique bubble clustering behavior multiplies nucleation at a single site by up to 5 times, while identification of a “main effective region” enhances the heat transfer coefficient by 12.0 %. The EDW effect enables reversible temporal boiling modulation, reducing copper surface temperature by 4.6 °C. This work establishes a low-voltage approach for intelligent boiling regulation, offering new paradigm for real-time, adaptive heat transfer enhancement