THE EFFECT OF STEFAN FLOW ON THE MODELS OF DROPLET EVAPORATION.

Droplet evaporation has been widely studied in the literature due to its key role in various applications in science and industry. The problem of droplet evaporation involves various mechanisms in both liquid and vapor phases together with the interface separating them. Modeling of this multiphase problem is not straightforward thereof studied by many researchers but in every time a few different contributing mechanisms could be highlighted. One of the pieces of this puzzle is undoubtedly the Stefan flow, which is always present during the evaporation of a liquid to an insoluble surrounding gas, yet the number of studies exploring its individual contribution to the evaporation remain very restricted. In the current study, the effect of Stefan flow is assessed by employing a recent state-of-the-art model that accounts for all pertinent physics of droplet evaporation. Results reveal that Stefan flow can be responsible for 17% of total evaporation when the droplet is placed on a high temperature substrate. Moreover, it is shown that lower performance of diffusion based models (in gas phase) can be greatly enhanced by incorporating the effect of Stefan flow into the interfacial mass flux equation. In addition, performances of existing purely diffusion and diffusion and Stefan flow based correlations in the prediction of evaporation rates are elucidated. Last but not least, under varying humidity of the surrounding gas, contribution of individual transport mechanisms in gas phase to the total evaporation rate is found to be unaffected. Based on this result, it is hypothesized that contributions of Stefan flow and natural convection have a linear dependence on the contribution of sole diffusion. The current study clearly demonstrated that Stefan flow considerably enhances the evaporation rate of droplets, especially in the case of high substrate heating. Therefore, future studies on the topic should account for the Stefan flow during the modeling of droplet evaporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]