Dynamics of a Sessile Droplet Evaporation

G. Marinaro[1], A. Accardo[1], E. Di Fabrizio[1]
[1]Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Nanostructures Department, Genova, Italy
Published in 2012

Evaporation of sessile droplets is associated with simple phenomena such as the ring-like spot left by a drying coffee droplet. Evaporation rate plays an important role on the convective motion inside the droplet. These fluxes are for example one of the factors responsible for amyloid fibrillation of proteins, a mechanism present in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer. In our assumption, aqueous vapor concentration changes and settles rapidly respect to the time of evaporation. For this reason the evaporation was hypothesized to be a quasi-steady-state process. The shrinkage evolution was obtained both by Matlab through an in-house developed code and by COMSOL using the moving mesh (Arbitrary Langrangian-Eulerian Method). Simulations of sessile droplets evaporation on superhydrophobic surfaces are under further development.