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Tag: Leidenfrost drops

  • The Leidenfrost Crack

    The Leidenfrost Crack

    In 1756, Leidenfrost reported on the peculiar behaviors of droplets on surface much hotter than the liquid’s boiling point. Such droplets were highly mobile, surfing on a thin layer of their own vapor and were prone to loud cracking noises.

    More recently, scientists have observed that drops with an initially small radius eventually rocket off the hot surface whereas larger drops end their lives in an explosion (above) – the source of Leidenfrost’s crack. Now researchers have explained why drops of different sizes have such different fates. The key is their level of contamination.

    To reach the take-off radius, the drop has to evaporate a significant portion of its volume. For an initially-large drop, that’s tough because any solid contaminants in the drop will build up along the surface of the drop as it shrinks. Eventually, they restrict the liquid from evaporating, which thins the vapor layer the drop sits on. It sinks until a part of it touches the surface. The sudden influx of heat from the surface explosively destroys whatever remains of the drop. (Image and research credit: S. Lyu et al.; via Brown University; submitted by gdurey)

  • Exploding a Drop

    Exploding a Drop

    Leidenfrost drops levitate over a hot substrate on a thin layer of their own vapor, constantly replenished as the drop evaporates. For the most part, previous studies have focused on pure droplets, but a new one looks at what happens when you add surfactants – and the results are, well, explosive.

    Surfactants are a type of chemical that like to gather at the surface of a drop, and, unlike water, they’re nonvolatile – they don’t evaporate easily. So as the Leidenfrost drop evaporates and shrinks, the surface of the drop becomes more and more crowded with surfactant molecules. Eventually, they form an elastic shell around the remaining water, making evaporation more difficult.

    Inside the droplet, the temperature continues to rise, eventually reaching a point where bubbles of vapor can nucleate inside. When that happens, the bubbles expand almost instantaneously and the internal pressure spike bursts the shell, causing the entire droplet to explode. (Image and research credit: F. Moreau et al.)

  • Wheeling Drops

    Wheeling Drops

    Leidenfrost drops – which skitter almost frictionlessly across extremely hot surfaces on a thin layer of their own vapor – are notoriously mobile. We’ve seen numerous methods of controlling their propulsion, often using specially-shaped surfaces. But it turns out that some Leidenfrost drops can self-propel even on a smooth, flat surface (top image). 

    Internally, large Leidenfrost drops have complicated, but symmetric flows that are driven by temperature and surface tension variations across the drop. But as the drop evaporates, that symmetry eventually gets broken, leaving behind a single large circulating flow. 

    Beneath the drop, that internal circulation affects the vapor layer. It causes the layer to take on an overall tilt, and the rotation, along with that slight angle in the vapor layer, causes the Leidenfrost drop to roll away like a wheel. (Image and research credit: A. Bouillant et al.; via NYTimes)

  • A Star Drop

    A Star Drop

    There are many ways to make a droplet oscillate in a star-shape – like vibrating its surface or using acoustic waves to excite it – but these methods involve externally forcing the droplet’s oscillation. Leidenfrost drops – liquids levitating on a film of their own vapor caused by the extremely hot surface below – turn themselves into stars. It all starts with the constant evaporation driven by the heat below. This creates a thin, fast-moving layer of vapor flowing beneath the drop. That vapor shears the drop, causing capillary waves – essentially ripples – that travel through the drop in a characteristic way. Those ripples in turn cause pressure oscillations in the vapor layer, alternately squeezing and releasing it. Feedback from the vapor layer then drives the droplet into star-shaped oscillations. Under the right conditions, water drops can form stars with as many as 13 points! (Image and research credit: X. Ma and J. Burton, source)

  • Controlling Leidenfrost Drops

    Controlling Leidenfrost Drops

    On a surface much hotter than their boiling point, droplets can surf on a layer of their own vapor due to the Leidenfrost effect. Recent research has shown that textured surfaces like ratchets can create corrals, traps, and mazes for such droplets. Here, researchers manipulate the propulsion of Leidenfrost drops using non-parallel grooves instead. When placed between two non-parallel plates, the droplet is squeezed by side forces perpendicular to the walls, with the resultant force in the direction where the gap widens. In most states, friction forms an opposition to this squeeze, but for Leidenfrost droplets that frictional force is negligible. Instead, the squeezing from the plates launches droplets toward the wider end of the groove, allowing researchers to design repellers (top) and traps (bottom) for the fast-moving drops. (Image credits: C. Luo et al., source)

  • Aerodynamic Leidenfrost Effect

    Aerodynamic Leidenfrost Effect

    If you place a droplet on a surface much hotter than its boiling point, that droplet will skitter and float almost frictionlessly across the surface on a thin layer of its own vapor. This is what is known as the Leidenfrost effect. But you don’t have to heat a surface to get this behavior. There’s also an aerodynamic Leidenfrost effect, shown above, when the surface is moving. As the surface moves, it drags a layer of air along with it, and that layer of air is capable of keeping droplets aloft indefinitely. The thickness of the air layer depends on speed; the faster the plate moves, the thicker the air layer underneath droplets. The aerodynamic forces generated are large enough to drive a droplet up an incline against the force of gravity (bottom image). (Image credit: animation – M. Saito et al., source; chronophotograph – A. Gautheir et al., pdf)