Article dans npj Microgravity “Sessile volatile drop evaporation under microgravity”

Sanjeev Kumar, Marc Medale, Paolo Di Marco and David Brutin

The evaporation of sessile drops of various volatile and non-volatile liquids, and their internalflow patterns with or withoutinstabilities have been the subject of many investigations. The current experiment is a preparatory one for a space experimentplanned to be installed in the European Drawer Rack 2 (EDR-2) of the International Space Station (ISS), to investigate dropevaporation in weightlessness. In this work, we concentrate on preliminary experimental results for the evaporation ofhydrofluoroether (HFE-7100) sessile drops in a sounding rocket that has been performed in the frame of the MASER-14 SoundingRocket Campaign, providing the science team with the opportunity to test the module and perform the experiment in microgravityfor six consecutive minutes. The focus is on the evaporation rate, experimentally observed thermo-capillary instabilities, and the de-pinning process. The experimental results provide evidence for the relationship between thermo-capillary instabilities and themeasured critical height of the sessile drop interface. There is also evidence of the effects of microgravity and Earth conditions onthe sessile drop evaporation rate, and the shape of the sessile drop interface and its influence on the de-pinning process.

npj Microgravity (2020) 6:37 ; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41526-020-00128-2