Prediction Of Thin Liquid Film Evaporation Characteristics With A Thermal Lattice Boltzmann Method

Evaporation plays an important role in many industrial applications, such as power generation, cooling, and thermal management. Micro/nanostructured surfaces have the potential of enhancing evaporation heat transfer, but its heat and mass transport mechanism becomes more complicated because of the surface wettability and capillarity effects. It is imperative to understand the evaporation mechanism of thin liquid film for heat transfer enhancement. Effective evaporation occurs in the thin liquid film region, instead of in the adsorbed ultrathin film region or intrinsic meniscus region. Although some theoretical and experimental results have been reported, detailed thin film evaporation (TFE) physics, especially heat and mass transport at the liquid-vapor interface, is still unclear. In this paper, we provide a mesoscopic lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to study the TFE problems under various heating scenarios. In our study, a thermal LBM approach is used to simulate TFE and predict some macroscopic properties. Our thermal LBM simulations agree well with the reported experimental data and theoretical results, which empowers our model to probe the interfacial TFE physics and design high-performance micro/nano engineered evaporators.