No Arabic abstract
We characterize the water repartition within the partially saturated (two-phase) zone (PSZ) during evaporation out of mixed wettable porous media by controlling the wettability of glass beads, their sizes, and as well the surrounding relative humidity. Here, Capillary numbers are low and under these conditions, the percolating front is stabilized by gravity. Using experimental and numerical analyses, we find that the PSZ saturation decreases with the Bond number, where packing of smaller particles have higher saturation values than packing made of larger particles. Results also reveal that the extent (height) of the PSZ, as well as water saturation in the PSZ, both increase with wettability. We also numerically calculate the saturation exclusively contained in connected liquid films and results show that values are less than the expected PSZ saturation. These results strongly reflect that the two-phase zone is not solely made up of connected capillary networks, but also made of disconnected water clusters or pockets. Moreover, we also find that global saturation (PSZ + full wet zone) decreases with wettability, confirming that greater quantity of water is lost via evaporation with increasing hydrophilicity. These results show that connected liquid films are favored in more hydrophilic systems while disconnected water pockets are favored in less hydrophilic systems.
The existence of the exclusion zone (EZ), a layer of water in which plastic microspheres are repelled from hydrophilic surfaces, has now been independently demonstrated by several groups. A better understanding of the mechanisms which generate EZs would help with understanding the possible importance of EZs in biology and in engineering applications such as filtration and microfluidics. Here we review the experimental evidence for EZ phenomena in water and the major theories that have been proposed. We review experimental results from birefringence, neutron radiography, nuclear magnetic resonance, and other studies. Pollack and others have theorized that water in the EZ exists has a different structure than bulk water, and that this accounts for the EZ. We present several alternative explanations for EZs and argue that Schurrs theory based on diffusiophoresis presents a compelling alternative explanation for the core EZ phenomenon. Among other things, Schurrs theory makes predictions about the growth of the EZ with time which have been confirmed by Florea et al. and others. We also touch on several possible confounding factors that make experimentation on EZs difficult, such as charged surface groups, dissolved solutes, and adsorbed nanobubbles.
We use transition path sampling to study evaporation in the SPC/E model of liquid water. Based on thousands of evaporation trajectories, we characterize the members of the transition state ensemble (TSE), which exhibit a liquid-vapor interface with predominantly negative mean curvature at the site of evaporation. We also find that after evaporation is complete, the distributions of translational and angular momenta of the evaporated water are Maxwellian with a temperature equal to that of the liquid. To characterize the evaporation trajectories in their entirety, we find that it suffices to project them onto just two coordinates: the distance of the evaporating molecule to the instantaneous liquid-vapor interface, and the velocity of the water along the average interface normal. In this projected space, we find that the TSE is well-captured by a simple model of ballistic escape from a deep potential well, with no additional barrier to evaporation beyond the cohesive strength of the liquid. Equivalently, they are consistent with a near-unity probability for a water molecule impinging upon a liquid droplet to condense. These results agree with previous simulations and with some, but not all, recent experiments.
Columnar jointing is a fracture pattern common in igneous rocks in which cracks self-organize into a roughly hexagonal arrangement, leaving behind an ordered colonnade. We report observations of columnar jointing in a laboratory analog system, desiccated corn starch slurries. Using measurements of moisture density, evaporation rates, and fracture advance rates as evidence, we suggest an advective-diffusive system is responsible for the rough scaling behavior of columnar joints. This theory explains the order of magnitude difference in scales between jointing in lavas and in starches. We investigated the scaling of average columnar cross-sectional areas due to the evaporation rate, the analog of the cooling rate of igneous columnar joints. We measured column areas in experiments where the evaporation rate depended on lamp height and time, in experiments where the evaporation rate was fixed using feedback methods, and in experiments where gelatin was added to vary the rheology of the starch. Our results suggest that the column area at a particular depth is related to both the current conditions, and hysteretically to the geometry of the pattern at previous depths. We argue that there exists a range of stable column scales allowed for any particular evaporation rate.
We study numerically the influence of contact angle on slow evaporation in two-dimensional model porous media. For sufficiently low contact angles, the drying pattern is fractal and can be predicted by a simple model combining the invasion percolation model with the computation of the diffusive transport in the gas phase. The overall drying time is minimum in this regime and is independent of contact angle over a large range of contact angles up to the beginning of a transition zone. As the contact angle increases in the transition region, the cooperative smoothing mechanisms of the interface become important and the width of the liquid gas interface fingers that form during the evaporation process increases. The mean overall drying time increases in the transition region up to an upper bound which is reached at a critical contact angle Theta_c. The increase in the drying time in the transition region is explained in relation with the diffusional screening phenomenon associated with the Laplace equation governing the vapor transport in the gas phase. Above Theta_c the drying pattern is character- ized by a flat traveling front and the mean overall drying time becomes independent of the contact angle. Drying time fluctuations are studied and are found to be important below Theta_c, i.e., when the pattern is fractal. The fluctuations are of the same order of magnitude regardless of the value of contact angle in this range. The fluctuations are found to die out abruptly at Theta_c as the liquid gas interface becomes a flat front.
Laboratory experimental results are presented for nonlinear Internal Solitary Waves (ISW) propagation in deep water configuration with miscible fluids. The results are validated against direct numerical simulations and traveling wave exact solutions where the effect of the diffused interface is taken into account. The waves are generated by means of a dam break and their evolution is recorded with Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). In particular, data collected in a frame moving with the waves are presented here for the first time. Our results are representative of geophysical applications in the deep ocean where weakly nonlinear theories fail to capture the characteristics of large amplitude ISWs from field observations.