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Boiling crisis and non-equilibrium drying transition

Boiling crisis is the rapid formation of the quasi-continuous vapor film between the heater and the liquid when the heat supply exceeds a critical value. We propose a mechanism for the boiling crisis that is based on the spreading of the dry spot under a vapor bubble. The spreading is initiated by the vapor recoil force, a force coming from the liquid evaporation into the bubble. Since the evaporation intensity increases sharply near the triple contact line, the influence of the vapor recoil can be described as a change of the apparent contact angle. Therefore, for the most usual case of complete wetting of the heating surface by the liquid, the boiling crisis can be understood as a drying transition from complete to partial wetting. The state of nucleate boiling, which is boiling in its usual sense, is characterized by a very large rate of heat transfer from the heating surface to the bulk because the superheated liquid is carried away from the heating surface by the departing vapor bubbles. If the heating power is increased, the temperature of the heating surface increases with the heat flux. When the heat flux from the heater reaches a threshold value q CHF (the critical heat flux, CHF), the vapor bubbles suddenly form a film which covers the heating surface and insulates the latter from the bulk of the liquid. The temperature of the heating surface grows so rapidly that the heater can fuse unless its power is controlled. This phenomenon is known under the names of "boiling crisis," "burnout," or "Departure from Nucleate Boiling" (DNB) [1]. The final state of this transition is called film boiling. This problem has become very important since the 1940's, with the beginning of the industrial exploitation of heat exchangers with large heat fluxes (as with nuclear power stations). Since then a huge amount of research has been done for the various conditions of pool boiling (boiling without imposed external flow) and flow boiling (boiling of the flowing water) [2]. Numerous empirical correlations have been proposed, each describing the dependence of the CHF on the physical parameters of the liquid and of the heater more or less correctly for a particular geometry and particular conditions of boiling [2]. A strong dependence of the threshold on the details of the experimental setup coupled with difficulties in separating the consequences of DNB from its causes is at the origin of a large number of frequently controversial hypotheses [2]. The violence of boiling makes observations quite difficult. Good quality photographic experiments are presented in only a few articles (see e.g. [3] -- [6]). Despite an increasing interest in the physical aspect of the problem during recent years [7,8] and numerous empirical approaches, the underlying physics still remains obscure. In this Letter, we propose a model based on a non-equilibrium drying transition.