Paper detail

Competing advection decelerates droplet evaporation on heated surfaces

In this article we report the atypical and anomalous evaporation kinetics of saline sessile droplets on surfaces with elevated temperatures. In a previous we showed that saline sessile droplets evaporate faster compared to water droplets when the substrates are not heated. In the present study we discover that in the case of heated surfaces, the saline droplets evaporate slower than the water counterpart, thereby posing a counter-intuitive phenomenon. The reduction in the evaporation rates is directly dependent on the salt concentration and the surface wettability. Natural convection around the droplet and thermal modulation of surface tension is found to be inadequate to explain the mechanisms. Flow visualisations using particle image velocimetry PIV reveals that the morphed advection within the saline droplets is a probable reason behind the arrested evaporation. Infrared thermography is employed to map the thermal state of the droplets. A thermosolutal Marangoni based scaling analysis is put forward. It is observed that the Marangoni and internal advection borne of thermal and solutal gradients are competitive, thereby leading to the overall decay of internal circulation velocity, which reduces the evaporation rates. The theoretically obtained advection velocities conform to the experimental results. This study sheds rich insight on a novel yet anomalous species transport behaviour in saline droplets.