It’s a process so fundamental to everyday life — in everything from your morning coffeemaker to the huge power plant that provides its electricity — that it’s often taken for granted: the way a liquid boils away from a hot surface.
It’s a process so fundamental to everyday life — in everything from your morning coffeemaker to the huge power plant that provides its electricity — that it’s often taken for granted: the way a liquid boils away from a hot surface.
Yet surprisingly, this basic process has only now, for the first time, been analyzed in detail at a molecular level, in a new analysis by MIT postdoc Zhengmao Lu, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, and three others at MIT and Tokyo University. The study appears in the journal Nature Communications.
“It turns out that for the process of liquid-to-vapor phase change, a fundamental understanding of that is still relatively limited,” Wang explains. “While there’s been a lot of theories developed, there actually has not been experimental evidence of the fundamental limits of evaporation physics.”
It’s an important process to understand because it is so ubiquitous. “Evaporation is prevalent in all sorts of different types of systems such as steam generation for power plants, water desalination technologies, membrane distillation, and thermal management, like heat pipes, for example,” Wang says. Optimizing the efficiency of such processes requires a clear understanding of the dynamics at play, but in many cases engineers rely on approximations or empirical observations to guide their choices of materials and operating conditions.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: Evaporation hasn’t been studied in detail at a molecular level, until now. New MIT research has revealed details of the process. Image courtesy of the researchers.
