Progress in understanding of evaporation of droplets:Fundamentals and applications

Evaporation of liquid droplets, especially water and aqueous solutions, is the basis of various industrial technologies and is found in many natural phenomena. In particular, the analysis of droplet evaporation is important to model the drying process of solutions in the pharmaceutical and food industries, the thermal processes in combustion engines, the use of water mist curtains in fire safety and the reasonable use of irrigation in agriculture. Climate studies, including the Earth's atmosphere and the ocean-atmosphere interactions, also require computational modeling evaporation of water droplets with various impurities and seawater droplets in the ocean's surface layer. The present review paper includes analyses of the evaporation of relatively large sessile droplets and small droplets suspended in ambient air. The paper describes some little-known details regarding modeling the radiative evaporation of single droplets and droplet layers including the spectral radiative transfer analysis. The review also covers the evaporation of sessile droplets, which is relevant in various applications. The impact of interfacial effects, such as contact angle hysteresis and Marangoni flows, on sessile droplet evaporation is discussed. Trends for future investigation are foreseen.