Heat and mass transfer at a free surface with diabatic boundaries in a single-species system under microgravity conditions

Abstract

In this paper, we analyzed the heat and mass transfer at a free surface under microgravity conditions. The SOURCE-II (Sounding Rocket COMPERE Experiment) experiment was performed on a suborbital flight in February 2012 from Esrange in North Sweden. It provided representative data with respect to solid, liquid, and vapor temperatures as well as the visible surface position. The objectives were to quantify the deformation of the free liquid surface and to correlate the apparent contact angle to a characteristic temperature difference between subcooled liquid and superheated wall. Furthermore, the influence of evaporation and condensation at the liquid/vapor interface and at the superheated wall must be taken into account to analyze heat and mass fluxes due to a characteristic temperature difference. In the following, we show evidently that the magnitude of the apparent contact angle depends on the exerted specific pressurizations of the vapor phase during the experiment and hence on the change in the saturation temperature at the free surface. The characteristic temperature difference is defined with respect to the wall temperature in the vicinity of the contact line and the saturation temperature. Therefore, apparent contact angle and temperature difference can be correlated and indicate a specific characteristic. Concerning the heat and mass transfer at the free liquid surface and the contact line, two different methods are presented to evaluate the net mass due to phase change within a certain time interval. In the first approach, the mass flow rate is calculated by means of the ideal gas law and its derivatives with respect to temperature and pressure. The second approach calculates the heat flux as well as the mass flux at the wall and in the region of the free liquid surface. In these cases, a specific heat transfer coefficient and a thermal boundary layer thickness are used.