Spreading and evaporation of surfactant solution droplets

Evaporation of liquid droplets in gas volume has implications in different areas: spray drying and production of fine powders [1–3], spray cooling, fuel preparation, air humidifying, heat exchangers, drying in evaporation chambers of air conditioning systems, fire extinguishing, fuel spray auto ignition (Diesel), solid surface templates from evaporation of nanofluid drops (coffee-ring effect), spraying of pesticides[1–4], painting, coating and inkjet printing, printed MEMS devices, micro lens manufacturing, spotting of DNA microarray data [3–5]. Because of such wide range of industrial applications this phenomenon has been under investigation for many years, both in the case of pure and multicomponent fluids. The studies encompass different conditions: constant pressure and temperature, elevated pressure, fast compression, still gas atmosphere and turbulent reacting flows, strongly and weakly pinning substrates [1, 2]. Even though experimental, theoretical and computer simulation studies have been carried out [1–11], and have taken into account different physical processes; heat transfer inside droplets, mass diffusion in bi- and multi- component fluids, droplet interactions in sprays, turbulence, radiation adsorption, thermal conductivity of the solid substrate, Marangoni convection inside the droplets.