Experimental Investigation of the Evaporation of Droplets in Axial Acoustic Fields

The effect of axialacoustic Ž elds on the evaporationof individualdroplets is investigatedboth experimentallyand theoretically. A setup was developed in which images of droplets moving through an acoustic Ž eld were acquired using a state-of-the-art, high-speed, intensiŽ ed video system. The evaporation rates of droplets were determined from the droplet diameters measured from these images. Experimental investigations using methanol droplets showed that the presence of an acoustic Ž eld signiŽ cantly enhances the evaporation of droplets. The evaporation rate is a strong function of the acoustic amplitude, but increases only slightlywith frequency. The effect of acoustic oscillations on water and methanol droplet evaporation was theoretically modeled by numerically integrating the differential equations for droplet mass, momentum,and heat transfer. The model uses quasisteady correlations for momentumheat and mass transfer. The model predicted the measured trends correctly. However, the quantitative agreement of these predictions with the experimental data depends strongly on the correlations for Nussult and Sherwood numbers used to model the energy and mass transfer, respectively.