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Title: THE ACCOMMODATION COEFFICIENT OF SALINE SESSILE WATER DROPLETS EVAPORATING WITH VARYING NON-VOLATILE IMPURITY LOADS
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1944323
PAR ID:
10309482
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Editor(s):
Meyer, J. P.
Date Published:
Journal Name:
15th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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