Heat Transfer by Sweat Droplet Evaporation

Sweating regulates the body temperature in extreme environments or during exercise. Here, we investigate the evaporative heat transfer of a sweat droplet at the microscale to unveil how the evaporation complexity of a sweat droplet would affect the body's ability to cool under specific environmental conditions. Our findings reveal that, depending on the relative humidity and temperature levels, sweat droplets experience imperfect evaporation dynamics, whereas water droplets evaporate perfectly at equivalent ambient conditions. At low humidity, the sweat droplet fully evaporates and leaves a solid deposit, while at high humidity, the droplet never reaches a solid deposit and maintains a liquid phase residue for both low and high temperatures. This unprecedented evaporation mechanism of a sweat droplet is attributed to the intricate physicochemical properties of sweat as a biofluid. We suppose that the sweat residue deposited on the surface by evaporation is continuously absorbing the surrounding moisture. This route leads to reduced evaporative heat transfer, increased heat index, and potential impairment of the body's thermoregulation capacity. The insights into the evaporative heat transfer dynamics at the microscale would help us to improve the knowledge of the body's natural cooling mechanism with practical applications in healthcare, materials science, and sports science.