Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2012
A small vicinity of a contact line, with well-defined (micro)scales (henceforth the“microstructure”), is studied theoretically for a system of a perfectly wetting liquid,its pure vapor and a superheated flat substrate. At one end, the microstructure terminatesin a non-evaporating microfilm owing to the disjoining-pressure-induced Kelvin effect. Atthe other end, for motionless contact lines, it terminates in a constant film slope(apparent contact angle as seen on a larger scale), the angle being non-vanishing despitethe perfect wetting due to an overall dynamic situation engendered by evaporation. Here wego one step beyond the standard one-sided model by incorporating the effect of vaporpressure non-uniformity as caused by a locally intense evaporation flow, treated in theStokes approximation. Thereby, the film dynamics is primarily affected throughthermodynamics (shift of the local saturation temperature and evaporation rate), thedirect mechanical impact being rather negligible. The resulting integro-differentiallubrication film equation is solved by handling the newly introduced effect (giving riseto the “integro” part) as a perturbation. In the ammonia (at 300 K) example dealt withhere, it proves to be rather weak indeed: the contact angle decreases while the integralevaporation flux increases just by a few percent for a superheat of ~1 K.However, the numbers grow (roughly linearly) with the superheat.