Complex dynamics of evaporation-driven convection in liquid layers

摘要

The spontaneous convective patterns induced by evaporation of a pure liquidlayer are studied experimentally. A volatile liquid layer placed in acylindrical container is left free to evaporate into air at rest under ambientconditions. The liquid/gas interface of the evaporating liquid layer isvisualized using an infrared (IR) camera. The phenomenology of the observedconvective patterns is qualitatively analysed, showing in particular that thelatter can be quite complex especially at moderate liquid thicknesses.Attention is also paid to the influence of the container diameter on theobserved patterns sequence.