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Abstract
The evaporation of micro droplets plays an important role in many technical application fields. However, the physico-chemical laws governing the evaporation process in different types of droplet systems are still not fully understood. An intergrated approach is presented for investigating evaporting droplets of solvents on polymer surface consisting of well controlled experiments supported by mathematical modeling. Sessile drop, condensing drop, and falling drop experiments can be carried out under well-controlled process conditions. After evaporation, the droplet leaves a crater in the polymer surface. Data evaluation then requires the automatic shape abstraction from 3D atomic force microscopy profile measurements. Finally, the obtained data are used to calibrate a mathematical model of the process. This model in turn is applied in a parameter study to identify the most relevant parameters and to design new experiments for model validation.
The work was partly done as a part of the research group FOR 516/1 funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the projects WI 1705/1–1 and GR 2003/2–1.