A New Exponent Characterizing the Effect of Evaporation on Imbibition Experiments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how evaporation influences imbibition, revealing a new critical exponent for interface roughness and proposing a disorder gradient model that aligns with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel exponent characterizing evaporation effects and models evaporation via a disorder gradient, advancing understanding of interface dynamics.

Findings

Discovery of a new exponent for saturated surface width

Validation of the disorder gradient model against experiments

Prediction of a new scaling relation for interface width

Abstract

We report imbibition experiments investigating the effect of evaporation on the interface roughness and mean interface height. We observe a new exponent characterizing the scaling of the saturated surface width. Further, we argue that evaporation can be usefully modeled by introducing a gradient in the strength of the disorder, in analogy with the gradient percolation model of Sapoval {\it et~al.}. By incorporating this gradient we predict a new critical exponent and a novel scaling relation for the interface width. Both the exponent value and the form of the scaling agree with the experimental results.