Droplet evaporation on a horizontal substrate under gravity field by mesoscopic modeling

• A novel evaporation scheme introduced to the multiphase LBM model for the numerical framework.
• A new method proposed to determine the critical drop size of gravity effect.
• Critical diameter of water drop is independent of evaporation conditions, and surface wettability for normal cases.

The evaporation of water drop deposited on a horizontal substrate is investigated using a lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for multiphase flows with a large-density ratio. To account for the variation of evaporation flux distribution along the drop interface, a novel evaporation scheme is introduced into the LBM framework, and validated by comparison with experimental data. We aim at discovering the effect of gravity on the evaporating drop in detail, and various evaporation conditions are considered as well as different wetting properties of the substrates. An effective diameter is introduced as an indicator of the critical drop size under which gravity is negligible. Our results show that such critical diameter is much smaller than the capillary length, which has been widely accepted as the critical size in previous and current works. The critical diameter is found to be almost independent of the evaporation conditions and the surface wettability. A correlation between this critical diameter and the capillary length is also proposed for easy use in applications.

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