Progress in Understanding of Evaporation of Droplets: Fundamentals and Applications

What is it about?

The evaporation of liquid droplets, particularly water and aqueous solutions, forms the basis of various industrial technologies and is observed in numerous natural phenomena. In particular, the analysis of droplet evaporation is crucial for modelling the drying process of solutions in the pharmaceutical and food industries, as well as the thermal processes in combustion engines, the use of water mist curtains in fire safety, and the rational use of irrigation in agriculture. Climate studies, including the Earth's atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere interactions, also require computational modeling of the evaporation of water droplets with various impurities and seawater droplets in the ocean's surface layer. The 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 of radiative evaporation of single droplets and droplet layers, including spectral radiative transfer analysis. The review also covers the evaporation of sessile droplets, which is relevant to various applications. The impact of interfacial effects, contact angle hysteresis, and Marangoni flows on the evaporation of sessile droplets is discussed. Trends for future investigation are foreseen.

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