Experimental Study on the Friction Drag Reduction of Superhydrophobic Surfaces in Closed Channel Flow

Due to the importance of copper and its alloys in marine applications, the main objective of this research is to provide a simple, effective and low cost manufacturing approach to fabricate a superhydrophobic riblet copper surface with high drag reduction capability in laminar and turbulent flow regimes. Therefore, the riblets are produced by wire cut technique on the copper substrate and then by using a wet chemical method, a superhydrophobic coating is produced on the riblet surface. A pressure drop measurement system consists; pump, closed channel flow with a fabricated surfaces on the lower wall, connections and pressure drop transmitter is employed to measure the pressure drop in the close channel flow, for Reynolds number from 300 to 2769, in order to evaluate the ability of the fabricated surface to reduce the friction drag. The experimental results revealed that combining the abilities of the riblet and superhydrophobic surfaces increases the surface’s ability to reduce friction drag. In addition, the riblet surface and superhydrophobic riblet surface on average decreased the friction drag by 10.33% and 42.65% correspondingly in water flow ranging from laminar to turbulent flow regime. Finally, according to the experimental results, the drag reduction performance of riblet surface is improved from 18.9% to 56.9% after superhydrophobic coating.