Evaporatively driven morphological instability.
Simple observations of evaporating solutions reveal a complex hierarchy of spatiotemporal instabilities. We analyze one such instability suggested by the qualitative observations of Du and Stone and find that it is driven by a variant of the classical morphological instability in alloy solidification. In the latter case a moving solid-liquid interface is accompanied by a solutally enriched boundary layer that is thermodynamically metastable due to constitutional supercooling. Here, we consider the evaporation of an impure film adjacent to a solid composed of the nonvolatile species. In this case, constitutional supercooling within the film is created by evaporation at the solution-vapor interface and this drives the corrugation of the solid-solution interface across the thickness of the film. The principal points of this simple theoretical study are to suggest an instability mechanism that is likely operative across a broad range of technological and natural systems and to focus future quantitative experimental searches.
Institute of Theoretical Geophysics, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom.
Robert W
RW
Style
J S
JS
Wettlaufer