Analysis of the effects of evaporative cooling on the evaporation of liquid droplets using a combined field approach

Abstract

During liquid evaporation, the equations for the vapor concentration in the atmosphere and for the temperature in the liquid are coupled and must be solved in an iterative manner. In the present paper, a combined field approach which unifies the coupled fields into one single hybrid field and thus makes the iteration unnecessary is proposed. By using this approach, the influences of the evaporative cooling on the evaporation of pinned sessile droplets are investigated, and its predictions are found in good agreement with the previous theoretical and experimental results. A dimensionless number Ec which can evaluate the strength of the evaporative cooling is then introduced, and the results show that both the evaporation flux along the droplet surface and the total evaporation rate of the droplet decrease as the evaporative cooling number Ec increases. For drying droplets, there exists a critical value EcCrit below which the evaporative cooling effect can be neglected and above which the significance of the effect increases dramatically. The present work may also have more general applications to coupled field problems in which all the fields have the same governing equation.