Interfacial conditions during evaporation or condensation of water.

Abstract

Steady-state evaporation and condensation experiments have been conducted with water under conditions where buoyancy-driven convection is not present. The temperature profile in each phase has been measured. At the interface, independently of the direction of the phase change, a temperature discontinuity has been found to exist in which the interfacial vapor temperature is greater than that in the liquid. In a thin layer immediately below the interface the temperature is uniform in a layer ( approximately 0.5 mm) and below that the temperature profile is linear, indicating thermal conduction. The uniform temperature layer indicates a mixing process occurs near the interface that could result from surface-tension driven (Marangoni-Bénard) convection and/or from "energy partitioning" that is necessary to account for the measured temperature discontinuity near the interface. When the measured interfacial properties are used with the expression for the phase change rate that is obtained from statistical rate theory, it is found that the predictions are in close agreement with the measurements.