The Physics of Dew, Breath Figures and Dropwise Condensation

457 Pages·2022·13.005 MB·English

by  Daniel Beysens

Lecture Notes in Physics
Daniel Beysens
The Physics
of Dew, Breath
Figures and
Dropwise
Condensation
Lecture Notes in Physics
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Daniel Beysens
The Physics of Dew,
Breath Figures
and Dropwise
Condensation
DanielBeysens
ESPCI-PMMHandOPUR
Paris,France
ISSN0075-8450 ISSN1616-6361 (electronic)
LectureNotesinPhysics
ISBN978-3-030-90441-8 ISBN978-3-030-90442-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90442-5
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Foreword
露とくとく
A monk meets a gyrovague and asks him to teach something that could open
hisheart.Thegyrovagueshowshimahedgewithbeautifulflowerscoveredbythe
morningdewandanswers:Canyouseehowvainisthefloweringoftheseconvolvuli?
However, the morning dew will disappear before them… This story, attributed to
thegreatpoetSaigyô,revealshowdew,asearlyasduringthetwelfthcentury,was
consideredinJapanasapureandmelancholicsymbolofephemerality—vanishing
evenfasterthanthefragileconvolvuli.Amongothers,MatsuoBashôfivecenturies
later developed (assuming that a haiku can constitute a development) this line of
thought in his RecordofaWeather-exposedSkeleton:
Wishingdewdrops
couldsomehowwash
thisperishingworld…
Dew thus plays in Japan the role of soap bubbles in Europe—humble objects, on
the one hand, yet worth of contemplation and metaphysical thoughts. And like
soap bubbles, the scientists who looked at it realized that dew has indeed a lot
to say and to teach: the way it grows, as we blow on a cool surface, achieving
a so-called breath figure; the way it diffuses light, turning opaque a transparent
glass, from which we can deduce the micrometric scale of its individual droplets
andthewayitevaporates,asitshouldindeedforthefleetingbidimensionalcloud
that it was.
Daniel Beysens is one of the most eminent scientists in the field of dew and
watercondensation,apioneerinthestudyofbreathfiguresinthe80s,whodevoted
thesecondhalfofhiscareertothesefragileandelusiveobjects,withasuccessful
balanceoffundamentalandappliedapproaches.Speakingofapplications,control-
ling dew is a challenging program in itself, be it Peruvian villagers whose unique
source of water relies on harvesting the morning dew (or fog) with tall nets, or
v
vi Foreword
sophisticated texture that can encourage the spontaneous jump and evacuation of
condensing droplets as they form.
WecanbegratefultoDanielBeysenstohavewrittenathickbookonthislight
subject—not only for the philosophical satisfaction to see something (even a lot)
comingoutof(nearly)nothing,butalsobecausesuchabookdidnotexist;abook
thatspanstheentirefield,frombasicprinciplesthattellusunderwhichconditions
water condenses, to classical laws of dew growth, and further to recent develop-
ments—in a domain characteristic of the world of soft matter, with its ability to
hybridizedifferentsubjectareas,herephysicsofinterfaces,fluiddynamics,statis-
tical physics, surface chemistry and optics; a book which is also timely, since all
the progresses in our understanding of wetting phenomena have benefited to dew,
with the added charm of the reduction in scale: a drop of ten micrometers does
not always behave as its big sister of one millimeter.
The comprehensive and concrete character of Daniel Beysens’ book together
with its amazing collection of experimental illustrations makes it suitable for all
kinds of readers. Students will learn the physics of dew without any prerequisite;
researchers will be stimulated by the latest evolution of the field and engineers
will benefit from a complete state of the art and from the light shed on practical
applications. Dew may quickly fade out, but this book will certainly remain!
David Quéré
ESPCI and École Polytechnique
Paris, France
Preface
My interest in dew and Breath Figures (BFs, the pattern that forms on a cold sur-
face when breathing) started long ago when I was intrigued to see a ring around
a streetlight from the vantage point of a dewy window on an early morning bus.
The ring, which shrank after breathing on the window, was the signature of a
well-defined order in the growing drop pattern on the window. Several years of
study were then carried out in my laboratory at the French Atomic Energy Com-
mission (CEA) and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While
at UCLA, I collaborated with my friend Charles Knobler and we published the
first paper (Beysens and Knobler, 1986) concerning this simple but very rich
phenomenon whereby droplet growth, once constrained to grow on a substrate
with lower dimensionality, exhibits quite unusual features and, in particular, self-
organization.Duringthesepioneeringtimes,Ihadthegreatopportunitytodiscuss
and work with brilliant scientists (P. G. de Gennes, Y. Pomeau, J.-L. Viovy, D.
Roux, J.-P. Bouchaud) and met Roger Mérigoux, who was the first scientist to
become interested in BFs on liquids back in the 1930s.
Dew and breath figures are well known and ubiquitous phenomena although
they form under different cooling process: outdoor radiative deficit for dew and
indoor conduction cooling for breath figures. They exhibit, however, the same
dropwise condensation characteristics and the fact that droplet growth proceeds
from humid air or, to be more precise, from a gradient of water vapor pressure in
non-condensable gases. The same dropwise condensation pattern is also observed
when pure vapor condenses, however the growth characteristics can be markedly
different, with no vapor pressure gradient but pronounced thermal effects.
Dropwise condensation is a type of condensation that engineers have known
for long to be more efficient for heat transfer than filmwise condensation, simply
becauseitleavesdryafractionofthecondensersurface.Inadditiontotheirappli-
cation in the properties of heat condensers, many technological applications used
theself-organizationofBFsas,e.g.thinfilmgrowth(Beysensetal.,1990)orpro-
ducing nanofiltering membranes (Rodríguez-Hernández and Bormashenko, 2020).
However, curiously, nobody had previously investigated the statistical properties
of drop pattern evolution in terms of scaling.
vii
viii Preface
After a period of investigating the self-similar properties of droplet patterns,
anotherapproachfollowedwheredifferentsubstrates,withtheirspecificities,were
considered: liquid surface (e.g. paraffinic oil), phase-change materials (e.g. cyclo-
hexane) and micropatterned surfaces. The possibility to considerably change the
wettingpropertiesbymicro-ornanomanufacturingasolidsubstrate,togetherwith
largeimprovementsinmicro-andnanolithography,openedthewaytoagreatvari-
ety of substrate, superhydrophobic or superhydrophilic patterned surfaces, with
micro-grooves, micro-pillars or other shapes. In addition, the ability of trapping
oilinmicropatternedsubstratesproducedliquid-likesurfaces.Atthetimeofwrit-
ing, a large number of studies have dealt with the extremely rich varieties of such
patterned surfaces, giving rise to enhanced condensation and water collection on
inclined substrates and improved heat transfer, to cite only two examples.
Another aspect is water harvesting from dew, a complementary facet of the
studyoftheirphysics.Naturaldewisanomnipresentphenomenononearth.Water
collectedthiswayisenhancedbyusingthelastdevelopmentsofdropwiseconden-
sation(seemyrecentbookDewwater(Beysens,2018))whichdealswithdifferent
aspects of this alternative source of water.
This book aims to give to students, researchers and engineers the detailed
processesinvolvedindewandbreathfiguresand,moregenerally,indropwisefor-
mationandcollectionfromhumidairorpurewatervapor.Heatandmasstransfer,
nucleation and growth on smooth substrates are considered (solid, liquid, plas-
tic, undergoing phase-change or micropatterned substrates). The particular role of
thermal or geometrical discontinuities where growth can be enhanced or reduced,
dynamicalaspectsofself-diffusion,problemsrelatedtodropcollectionbygravity
and the optics of dropwise condensation are all discussed. Although the content
mainly deals with condensation from humid air, it can be readily generalized to
condensation of any substance. The specificities of pure vapor condensation (e.g.
steam) are also examined.
Thisforewordwouldnotbecompletewithoutmentioningthemanyfriendswith
whomIcollaboratedonthissubject:AnandS.,AndrieuC.,BardatA.,Berkowicz
S., Bintein P.-B., Bouchaud J.-P., Bourouina T., Broggini F., Chatterjee R., Chelle
M., Cui T., Doppelt E., Flura D., Fritter D., Godreche C., González-Viñas W.,
Guadarrama-Cetina J., Guenoun P., Huber L., Jacquemoud S., Khandkar M. D.,
Knobler C. M., Lhuissier H., Limaye A. V., Liu X., Marcos-Martin M., Marty F.,
Medici M.-G., Milimouk-Melnytchouk I., Mongruel A., Narhe R., Nikolayev V.
S., Pomeau Y., Roux D., Royon L., Rukmava C., Rykaczewski K., Saint-Jean S.,
Schmitthaeusler R., Shelke P. B., Sibille P., Steyer A., Subramanyam S. B, Tixier
N., Trosseille J., Varanasi K. K, Viovy J.-L., Yekutieli I. and Zhao H. I am very
grateful to them for their friendly support.
I thank David Quéré for his thoughtful Forewords. I am much indebted to
the CEA and the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educa-
tionalInstitution(ESPCI)forhavingprovided mewiththeireverlasting support.I
thank S. Berkowicz for English corrections and L. Limat and A. Eddi for helpful
discussions.
Preface ix
Imustexpressmydeepgratitudetomybelovedwife,Iryna,whosupportedme
throughout the writing of this book.
Paris, France Daniel Beysens