Study of Interfacial Mass Transfer on Vapor Bubbles in Microgravity

Abstract

The knowledge of interfacial heat and mass transfer is important for environmental and technical applications, especially nowadays for numerical simulations of two phase problems. However, the data available up to now are inconsistent, because most experiments performed on earth suffer under buoyancy and convection, and thus the boundary conditions at the evaluation could not clearly be defined. Therefore, we seized the opportunity to investigate interfacial heat and mass transfer in microgravity environment. In these experiments the growth and collapse in the overall superheated and subcooled bubles, respectively, liquid or free vapor bubbles were observed at various liquid temperature and pressure states and over periods of from a few seconds up to 300 seconds. It was for the first time that such very long periods of bubble growth could be observed. The experimental set-up allowed the control of the liquid supersaturation before the bubbles were initiated by a short heat pulse at a miniaturized heater. Therefore it was possible to perform a systematic parametric study. The measured curves for vapor bubble growth are in good agreement with our numerical simulation. Based on this model the kinetic coefficients for the evaporation and condensation according to Hertz-Knudsen have been derived from the experimental data.

Keywords

• nucleation, bubble dynamics, interfacial phenomena, evaporation and conden-sation kinetics, microgravity