A Formalism for Calculating the Evaporation Rates of Rapidly Evaporating Interacting Particles

Abstract

The transport equations governing the quasi-steady vapor density and temperature fields surrounding rapidly evaporating interacting spherical particles are reduced to the Laplace equation by using suitable variable transformations. Once reduced to this form, these equations can be solved by the method of images. This method is a fairly general one for solving the Laplace equation and can be applied to particle arrays consisting of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily arranged interacting particles which may differ in size and chemical composition. Interactions are shown to significantly affect particle evaporation rates even at large particle separations. For the arrays considered, however, particle temperatures are found to be unaffected by interactions.