Experimental and Numerical Study of the Evaporation of Water at Low Pressures

Although evaporation is considered to be a surface phenomenon, the rate of molecular transport across a liquid-vapor boundary is strongly dependent on the coupled fluid dynamics and heat transfer in the bulk fluids. Recent experimental thermocouple measurements of the temperature field near the interface of evaporating water into its vapor have begun to show the role of heat transfer in evaporation. However, the role of fluid dynamics has not been explored sufficiently. Here, we have developed a mathematical model to describe the coupling of the heat, mass, and momentum transfer in the fluids with the transport phenomena at the interface. The model was used to understand the experimentally obtained velocity field in the liquid and temperature profiles in the liquid and vapor, in evaporation from a concave meniscus for various vacuum pressures. By using the model, we have shown that an opposing buoyancy flow suppressed the thermocapillary flow in the liquid during evaporation at low pressures in our experiments. As such, in the absence of thermocapillary convection, the evaporation is controlled by heat transfer to the interface, and the predicted behavior of the system is independent of choosing between the existing theoretical expressions for evaporation flux. Furthermore, we investigated the temperature discontinuity at the interface and confirmed that the discontinuity strongly depends on the heat flux from the vapor side, which depends on the geometrical shape of the interface.