Evaporation Mass Flux: A Predictive Model and Experiments

Evaporation is a fundamental and core phenomenon in a broad range of disciplines including power generation and refrigeration systems, desalination, electronic/photonic cooling, aviation systems, and even biosciences. Despite its importance, the current theories on evaporation suffer from fitting coefficients with reported values varying in a few orders of magnitude. Lack of a sound model impedes simulation and prediction of characteristics of many systems in these disciplines. Here, we studied evaporation at a planar liquid–vapor interface through a custom-designed, controlled, and automated experimental setup. This experimental setup provides the ability to accurately probe thermodynamic properties in vapor, liquid, and close to the liquid–vapor interface. Through analysis of these thermodynamic properties in a wide range of evaporation mass fluxes, we cast a predictive model of evaporation based on nonequilibrium thermodynamics with no fitting parameters. In this model, only the interfacial temperatures of liquid and vapor phases along with the vapor pressure are needed to predict evaporation mass flux. The model was validated by the reported study of an independent research group. The developed model provides a foundation for all liquid–vapor phase change studies including energy, water, and biological systems.