Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 219, 143-154 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2013-01789-y

Regular Article

Evaporation of pinned sessile microdroplets of water on a highly heat-conductive substrate: Computer simulations

¹ Dept. of Chemical Engineering, Loughborough University, LE11 3TU Loughborough, UK
² Dept. of Quimica Fisica I, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid, Spain

^a e-mail: s.semenov@lboro.ac.uk
^b e-mail: v.m.starov@lboro.ac.uk
^c e-mail: rgrubio@quim.ucm.es

Received: 1 July 2012
Revised: 18 January 2013
Published online: 19 March 2013

Abstract

The aim of the current numerical study is to investigate the influence of individual effects (kinetic effects, latent heat of vaporization, Marangoni convection, Stefan flow, droplet's surface curvature) on the rate of evaporation of a water droplet placed on a highly heat conductive substrate for different sizes of the droplet (down to submicron sizes). We performed simulations for one particular set of parameters: the ambient relative air humidity is set to 70%, the ambient temperature is 20 ^∘C, the contact angle is 90^∘, and the substrate material is copper. The Suggested model combines both diffusive and kinetic models of evaporation. The obtained results allow estimation of the characteristic droplet sizes where each of the mentioned above phenomena becomes important or can be neglected.