Hidden in plain sight: How evaporation impacts the pendant drop method

TL;DR

This paper investigates how evaporation affects the accuracy of surface tension measurements using the pendant drop method, revealing significant temperature drops and flow effects that can bias results, and proposes a simple humidity control technique.

Contribution

It provides experimental and numerical analysis of evaporation impacts on the pendant drop method and introduces a passive humidity control method to improve measurement accuracy.

Findings

Evaporative cooling can reduce droplet temperature by about 10°C.

Surface tension measurements can be off by more than 1 mN/m due to evaporation.

Controlled humidity can mitigate evaporation effects in measurements.

Abstract

The surface tension of a liquid, which drives most free surface flows at small scales, is often measured with the pendant drop method due to its simplicity and reliability. When the drop is suspended in air, controlling the ambient temperature and humidity is usually an afterthought, resulting in evaporation of the drop during the measurement. Here, we investigate the effect of evaporation on the measured surface tension using experiments and numerical simulations. In the experiments, we measured the evolution of the droplet temperature, which can drastically reduce by ($\Delta T \approx 10 \degC$) due to evaporative cooling, and thereby altering the measured surface tension by more than 1 mN/m. This finding can be reproduced by numerical simulations, which additionally allows for controlled investigations of the individual influences of further effects on the pendant drop method, namely shape deformations by evaporation-driven flows in the gas-phase and in the liquid-phase including the resulting Marangoni flow. We provide a simple passive method to control the relative humidity without requiring additional instrumentation. Our findings are particularly pertinent to Marangoni flows which are driven by surface tension gradients, and which are consequently highly sensitive to measurement inaccuracies. We apply our method with different aqueous mixtures of glycerol and various diols. Our results and insights have implications for various applications, ranging from inkjet printing to agricultural sprays. Finally, we have meticulously documented our setup and procedure for future reference.