A numerical investigation of the evaporation process of a liquid droplet impinging onto a hot substrate (Q860077)

The article contains 5 section: 1. Introduction, 2.Numerical solution procedure, 3. Numerical details, 4. Presentation and discussion of results, 5. Conclusions, and a well selected list of 53 references. The paper is well written, self-contained and addresses specialists as well as readers from a wider audience -- the latter is due to the intriguing presentation and style of the article. Section 1 concisely introduces the subject of study dealt with in the article: the numerical investigation of the evaporation process of \(n\)-heptane and water liquid droplets impinging onto a hot substrate, covering temperature regimes above and below the Leidenfrost temperature. Section 1 is complemented by a detailed description of experimental, analytical and numerical investigations performed by the research community in this field. The numerical solution procedure addressed in Section 2 presents the Navier--Stokes equations expressing the flow distribution of the liquid and the gas phases and their coupling with the Volume of Fluid Method (VOF) for tracking the liquid-gas interface. The resulting equations are numerically solved for the flow field using the Finite Volume Method on two- or threedimensional unstructured grids using an adaptive local grid refinement technique, see also Section 3. The results presented and discussed in Section 4 show that an evaporation model coupled with the VOF methodology predicts the vapor blanket height between the evaporating droplet and the substrate, for cases with substrate temperature above the Leidenfrost point, and the formation of vapor bubbles in the region of nucleate boiling regime. Results are also compared with available experimental data. 15 figures with many subpanels illustrate the results.