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Direct measurement of selective evaporation of binary mixture droplets by dissolving materials

Year: 2018

Journal: J. Fluid Mech., Volume 850, JUL 10, page 769–783

Authors: Kim, Hyoungsoo; Stone, Howard A.

Organizations: Settlement Research Funds for newly hired tenure track faculty from KAIST [G04170022]

Keywords: complex fluids; condensation/evaporation; drops

We investigate experimentally and theoretically how a droplet of a binary mixture evaporates when placed on a solid substrate. Our focus is the limit at which the two liquid components have different vapour pressures. Using physicochemical effects, we directly visualize the selective evaporation of the more volatile component and so document the space and time dependence of the chemical distribution in the droplet. In particular, we observe that a mixture consisting of an organic solvent and deionized water dissolves suspended fluorescent polystyrene particles if the lower volatility organic solvent reaches a critical concentration. Consequently, we show that for a small contact angle (theta < pi/2) the suspended polystyrene particles begin to disappear from near the contact line, which indicates that the volatile component, here water, evaporates rapidly compared to the other component(s). Finally, we show that a diffusion-dominated model for evaporation of a binary mixture can predict well the experimental results where convective and diffusive mixing effects are negligible, in which case there is significant chemical segregation in the drop.