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1. THE ACCOMMODATION COEFFICIENT OF SALINE SESSILE WATER DROPLETS EVAPORATING WITH VARYING NON-VOLATILE IMPURITY LOADS

   Murray, B; Narayanan, S. (July 2021, 15th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics)

   Meyer, J. P. (Ed.)

   Air-water evaporation systems are ubiquitous in industrial applications, including processes such as fuel combustion, inkjet printing, spray cooling, and desalination. In these evaporation-driven systems, a fundamental understanding of mass accommodation at the liquid-vapour interface is critical to predicting and optimizing performance. Interfacial mass accommodation depends on many factors, such as temperature, vapour concentration, non-volatile impurity content, and non-condensable gasses present. Elucidating how these factors interact is essential to designing devices to meet demanding applications. Hence, high precision measurements are needed to quantify accommodation at the liquid-vapour interface accurately. Our previous study has shown surface averaged accommodation coefficients close to 0.001 for pure water droplets throughout evaporation. While it is well established that saline non-volatile impurities reduce the evaporation rate of sessile droplets, the dynamic effect on mass accommodation during the droplet's lifespan is yet to be determined. In this work, we combine experimental and computational techniques to determine the accommodation coefficient over the lifespan of 10-3 to 1 molar potassium chloride-water droplets evaporating on a gold-coated surface into dry nitrogen. This study uses a quartz crystal microbalance as a high-precision contact area sensor. It also determines the non-volatile impurities in the droplet with a precision on the order of nanograms. The computational model couples macroscopic measurements with the microscopic kinetic theory of gasses to quantify hard-to-measure physical quantities. We believe this study will provide a basis for predicting evaporative device performance in conditions where non-volatile impurities are intrinsic to the application. 

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2. The nanoscale Leidenfrost effect

   https://doi.org/10.1039/C9NR01386E  

   Rodrigues, Jhonatam; Desai, Salil (June 2019, Nanoscale)

   Nanoscale evaporation of liquids plays a key role in several applications including cooling, drag reduction and liquid transport. This research investigates the Leidenfrost effect at the nanoscale as a function of substrate material, droplet size and temperature using molecular dynamics models. Water droplets ranging from 4 nm to 20 nm were simulated over gold and silicon substrates at 293 K, 373 K, 473 K, and 573 K. A significant increase in the kinetic energy (>5000 kcal mol −1 ) was observed for molecules in the vicinity of the substrates, indicating the presence of a vapor barrier layer between substrate and liquid. Higher droplet velocities were tracked for hydrophobic gold substrates as compared to hydrophilic silicon substrates indicating the influence of the surface wettability on the Leidenfrost effect. Droplets over silicon substrates had a higher number of fluctuations (peaks and valleys) as compared to gold due to the cyclic behavior of vapor formation. An increase in the interfacial kinetic energies and translatory velocities (>10 m s −1 ) were observed as the droplet sizes reduced confirming the Leidenfrost effect at 373 K. This research provides understanding of the Leidenfrost effect at the nanoscale which can impact several applications in heat transfer and droplet propulsion. 

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3. Contact Line Pinning and Depinning Prior to Rupture of an Evaporating Droplet in a Simulated Soil Pore

   https://doi.org/10.1115/ICNMM2020-1091  

   Chakraborty, Partha P.; Derby, Melanie M. (July 2020, ASME 2020 18th International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels, and Minichannels collocated with the ASME 2020 Heat Transfer Summer Conference and the ASME 2020 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting)

   Altering soil wettability by inclusion of hydrophobicity could be an effective way to restrict evaporation from soil, thereby conserving water resources. In this study, 4-μL sessile water droplets were evaporated from an artificial soil millipore comprised of three glass (i.e. hydrophilic) and Teflon (i.e. hydrophobic) 2.38-mm-diameter beads. The distance between the beads were kept constant (i.e. center-to-center spacing of 3.1 mm). Experiments were conducted in an environmental chamber at an air temperature of 20°C and 30% and 75% relative humidity (RH). Evaporation rates were faster (i.e. ∼19 minutes and ∼49 minutes at 30% and 75% RH) from hydrophilic pores than the Teflon one (i.e. ∼24 minutes and ∼52 minutes at 30% and 75% RH) due in part to greater air-water contact area. Rupture of liquid droplets during evaporation was analyzed and predictions were made on rupture based on contact line pinning and depinning, projected surface area just before rupture, and pressure difference across liquid-vapor interface. It was observed that, in hydrophilic pore, the liquid droplet was pinned on one bead and the contact line on the other beads continuously decreased by deforming the liquid-vapor interface, though all three gas-liquid-solid contact lines decreased at a marginal rate in hydrophobic pore. For hydrophilic and hydrophobic pores, approximately 1.7 mm2 and 1.8–2 mm2 projected area of the droplet was predicted at 30% and 75% RH just before rupture occurs. Associated pressure difference responsible for rupture was estimated based on the deformation of curvature of liquid-vapor interface. 

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4. Investigation of sessile droplet evaporation using a transient two-step moving mesh model

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2023.124151  

   Li, Xue; Murray, Brandon; Narayan, Shankar (August 2023, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer)

   The evaporation of droplets on surfaces is a ubiquitous phenomenon essential in nature and industrial applications ranging from thermal management of electronics to self-assembly-based fabrication. In this study, water droplet evaporation on a thin quartz substrate is analyzed using an unsteady two-step arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) moving mesh model, wherein the evaporation process is simulated during the constant contact radius (CCR) and contact angle (CCA) modes. The numerical model considers mass transfer in the gas domain, flow in the liquid and gas domains, and heat transfer in the solid, liquid, and gas domains. Besides, the model also accounts for interfacial force balance, including thermocapillary stresses, to obtain the instantaneous droplet shape. Experiments involving droplet evaporation on unheated quartz substrates agree with model predictions of contact radius, contact angle, and droplet volume. Model results indicating temperature and velocity distribution across an evaporating water droplet show that the lowest temperatures are at the liquid-gas interface, and a single vortex exists for the predominant duration of the droplet's lifetime. The temperature of the unheated substrate is also significantly reduced due to evaporative cooling. The interfacial evaporation flux distribution, which depends on heat transfer across the droplet and advection in the surrounding medium, shows the highest values near the three-phase contact line. In addition, the model also predicts evaporation dynamics when the substrate is heated and exposed to different advection conditions. Generally, higher evaporation rates result from higher substrate heating and advection rates. However, substrate heating and advection in the surrounding gas have minimal effects on the relative durations of CCR and CCA modes for a given receding contact angle. Specifically, in this case, a 40× increase in substrate heating rate or 7.5× increase in gas velocity can only change these relative durations by 3%. This study also highlights the importance of surface wettability, which affects evaporation dynamics for all the conditions explored by the numerical model. 

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5. Use of A Genetic Algorithm to Model the Interaction of Conduction and Nucleate Boiling Mechanisms During Evaporation of Water Droplets on Superheated ZnO Nanostructured Surfaces, paper HT2023-107422

   Silva, Anisa D.; Carey, Van P. (July 2023, Proceedings of the ASME 2023 Heat Transfer Summer Conference HT2023)

   ABSTRACT At low surface superheat levels, water droplets deposited on ZnO nanostructured surfaces vaporize primarily by conduction transport of heat from the solid heated surface to the liquid-vapor interface. As the superheat is increased beyond the onset of bub- ble nucleation threshold (ONB), an increasing number of active nucleation sites are observed within the evaporating droplet re- ducing the time required to completely evaporate the droplet. There were two primary objectives of this investigation; first, to determine how system parameters dictate when ONB occurs and how its heat transfer enhancement effect increases with superheat. The second was to develop a physics-inspired model equation for the evaporation time of a droplet on a nanostructured surface which accounts for effects of conduction transport in the liquid layer of the droplet and nucleate boiling. A shape factor model for conduction-dominated vaporiza- tion of the droplet was first constructed. A correction factor was introduced to account for deviation of the measured droplet evaporation times from the conduction-dominated model. The correction factor form was postulated using a modified form of the onset of nucleate boiling parameter used in the well-known model analysis developed by Hsu to predict onset of nucleation and active nucleation site range in a thermal boundary layer as- sociated with forced convection boiling. Droplet footprint radii were experimentally observed to be affected by superheat and an additional term was introduced to account for this phenomenon. A term was also introduced to include correlations for boiling to incorporate system properties. This modeling led to an evaporation time equation contain- ing numerical constants dictated by the idealizations from the physical modeling. To develop an improved empirical model equation, these numerical values were taken to be adjustable constants, and a genetic algorithm was used to determine the ad- justable constant values that best fit a data collection spanning wide variations of droplet size, surface apparent contact angle, and superheat level. The best-fit constants match the data to an absolute fractional error of 26%. The model equation developed in this study provides insight into the interaction between con- duction transport and nucleate boiling effects that can arise in droplet vaporization processes. 

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