Impacting Water Droplets Can Alleviate Dust from Slanted Hydrophobic Surfaces

Water droplet impacting on a slanted dusty hydrophobic surface is examined in relation to dust mitigation from surfaces. Impacting droplet characteristics including droplet spreading/retraction rates, slipping length, and rebound heights are analyzed via high-speed recording and a tracker program. The environmental dust characteristics in terms of size, shape, elemental composition, and surface free energy are evaluated by adopting the analytical methods. The findings reveal that the dynamic characteristics of the impacting droplet on the slanted hydrophobic surface are significantly influenced by the dust particles. The maximum droplet spreading over the dusty surface becomes smaller than that of the nondusty surface. The presence of the dust particles on the slanted hydrophobic surface increases energy dissipation, and the water droplet slipping length over the surface becomes less than that corresponding to the nondusty surface. Impacting droplet fluid infuses over the dust particle surface, which enables mitigation of dust from the surface to the droplet fluid. A dust-mitigated area on the slanted surface is larger than that corresponding to the horizontal surface; in which case, the area ratio becomes almost six-fold, which slightly reduces with increasing Weber number. The optical transmittance of the dust-mitigated surface by the impacting droplet remains high.