ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the essential aspects of nanoscale interface manipulations and their functionality for engineering applications including heat/energy transfer. It introduces the principal factors and their fabrication procedure: metal-assisted chemical etching for silicon-based nanostructures, which is one of the representative top-down methods for fabrication, as well as a possible alternative for hierarchical structures and bulk micromachining. The chapter highlights the effects of interfacial manipulations on boiling heat transfer and introduce promising breakthroughs done and to be done in heat transfer technologies. It explains essential factors in fundamental fabrication procedures of silicon-based nano- and nano/micro-hierarchical structures, with details on how to control their shape and characteristic lengths through mask-based shadowgraph methods, and the possible application of metal-assisted chemical etching as a substitutional technique in bulk micromachining. The chapter focuses on the fundamentals of how the interfacial morphology affects wettability.