A Nusselt number correlation for a superhydrophobic solid sphere encapsulated in a perfect plastron

Surface-attached air bubbles are known to provide lubricating (i.e., drag reducing) benefits but their contribution to inhibiting heat transfer is not as well understood. The present theoretical study considers Stokes flow around a solid sphere and uses matched asymptotic expansions to estimate the degree of thermal insulation offered by an encapsulating air layer of uniform thickness. Key to our analysis is to derive an expression for the Nusselt number in terms of the air layer thickness and the Péclet number, \(\text{ Pe}_w\), of the surrounding liquid, here assumed to be water. This latter parameter, which characterizes advective to diffusive heat transport, is assumed to be small such that our zeroth- and first-order solutions are, respectively, proportional to \(\text{ Pe}_w^0\) and \(\text{ Pe}_w^1\). Although small \(\text{ Pe}_w\) favors small free stream velocities, forced convection will dominate over natural convection only if the free stream velocity (and/or the solid sphere radius) exceeds a certain threshold. This requirement constrains the solution space; on the other hand, it is straightforward to generalize our analysis so that it considers fluid pairs other than water and air.