Evaporation Dynamics in Buried Nanochannels with Micropores

Cross-connected buried nanochannels of height ∼728 nm, with micropores of ∼2 μm diameter present at each intersection, are used in this work to numerically and experimentally study droplet-coupled evaporation dynamics at room temperature. The uniformly structured channels/pores, along with their well-defined porosity, allow for computational fluid dynamics simulations and experiments to be performed on the same geometry of samples. A water droplet is placed on top of the sample causing water to wick into the nanochannels through the micropores. After advancing, the meniscus front stabilizes when evaporation flux is balanced with the wicking flux, and it recedes once the water droplet is completely wicked in. Evaporation flux at the meniscus interface of channels/pores is estimated over time, while the flux at the water droplet interface is found to be negligible. When the meniscus recedes in the channels, local contact line regions are found to form underneath the pores, thus rapidly enhancing evaporation flux as a power-law function of time. Temporal variation of wicking flux velocity and pressure gradient in the nanochannels is also independently computed, from which the viscous resistance variation is estimated and compared to the theoretical prediction.