# Natural convection above circular disks of evaporating liquids

## TL;DR

This paper combines theoretical modeling and experimental validation to understand how natural convection influences the evaporation rate of liquid disks, deriving scaling laws and confirming them through water evaporation experiments.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel theoretical framework linking boundary layer structure to evaporation rates and validates it with controlled experiments.

## Key findings

- Scaling laws accurately predict evaporation rates.
- Boundary layer effects significantly influence evaporation.
- Experimental results confirm theoretical predictions.

## Abstract

We investigate theoretically and experimentally the evaporation of liquid disks in the presence of natural convection due to a density difference between the vapor and the surrounding gas. From the analogy between thermal convection above a heated disk and our system, we derive scaling laws to describe the evaporation rate. The local evaporation rate depends on the presence of a boundary layer in the gas phase such that the total evaporation rate is given by a combination of different scaling contributions, which reflect the structure of the boundary layer. We compare our theoretical predictions to experiments performed with water in an environment controlled in humidity, which validate our approach.