The evaporating meniscus in a channel

Abstract

We consider the evaporating meniscus of a perfectly wetting liquid in a channel whose superheated walls are at common temperature. Heat flows by pure conduction from the walls to the phase interface; there, evaporation induces a small-scale liquid flow concentrated near the contact lines. Liquid is continually fed to the channel, so that the interface is stationary, but distorted by the pressure differences caused by the small-scale flow. To determine the heat flow, we make a systematic analysis of this free-boundary problem in the limit of vanishing capillary number based on the velocity of the induced flow. Because surface tension is then large, the induced flow can distort the phase interface only in a small inner region near the contact lines; the effect is to create an apparent contact angle $\mtheta$ depending on capillary number. Though, in general, there can be significant heat flow within that small inner region, the presence of an additional small parameter in the problem implies that, in practice, heat flow is significant only within the large outer region where the interface shape is determined by hydrostatics and $\mtheta$. We derive a formula for the heat flow, and show that the channel geometry affects the heat flow only through the value of the interface curvature at the contact line. Consequently, the heat flow relation for a channel can be applied to other geometries.