Fluid Flow in An Evaporating Droplet

Droplet evaporation is a common phenomenon in everyday life. For example, when a droplet of coffee or salt solution is dropped onto a surface and the droplet dries out, a ring of coffee or salt particles is left on the surface. This phenomenon exists not only in everyday life, but also in many practical industrial processes and scientific research and could also be used to assist in DNA sequence analysis, if the flow field in the droplet produced by the evaporation could be understood and predicted in detail. In order to measure the fluid flow in a droplet, small particles can be suspended into the fluid as tracers. From the ratio of gravitational force to Brownian force a(exp 4)(delta rho)(g)/k(sub B)T, we find that particle's tendency to settle is proportional to a(exp 4) (a is particle radius). So, to keep the particles from settling, the droplet size should be chosen to be in a range 0.1 -1.0 microns in experiments. For such small particles, the Brownian force will affect the motion of the particle preventing accurate measurement of the flow field. This problem could be overcome by using larger particles as tracers to measure fluid flow under microgravity since the gravitational acceleration g is then very small. For larger particles, Brownian force would hardly affect the motion of the particles. Therefore, accurate flow field could be determined from experiments in microgravity. In this paper, we will investigate the fluid flow in an evaporating droplet under normal gravity, and compare experiments to theories. Then, we will present our ideas about the experimental measurement of fluid flow in an evaporating droplet under microgravity.