Martin Brandenbourger

Leidenfrost drops on a heated liquid pool

We show that a volatile liquid drop placed at the surface of a non-volatile liquid pool warmer than the boiling point of the drop can experience a Leidenfrost effect even for vanishingly small superheats. Such an observation points to the importance of the substrate roughness, negligible in the case considered here, in determining the threshold Leidenfrost temperature. A theoretical model based on the one proposed by Sobac et al. [Phys. Rev. E 90, 053011 (2014)] is developed in order to rationalize the experimental data. The shapes of the drop and of the substrate are analyzed. The model notably provides scalings for the vapor film thickness. For small drops, these scalings appear to be identical to the case of a Leidenfrost drop on a solid substrate. For large drops, in contrast, they are different and no evidence of chimney formation has been observed either experimentally or theoretically in the range of drop sizes considered in this study. Concerning the evaporation dynamics, the radius is shown to decrease linearly with time whatever the drop size, which differs from the case of a Leidenfrost drop on a solid substrate. For high superheats, the characteristic lifetime of the drops versus the superheat follows a scaling law that is derived from the model but, at low superheats, it deviates from this scaling by rather saturating.

Leidenfrost drops: Effect of gravity

A specific experimental set-up has been installed in a large centrifuge facility in order to study different aspects of Leidenfrost drops under high-gravity conditions (5, 10, 15 and 20 times the Earth gravity). In particular, the drop lifetime and more precisely the variations of drop diameter vs. time have shown to be in good agreement with previous experiments and scaling analysis (Biance A.-L. et al., Phys. Fluids, 15 (2003) 1632). Moreover, so-called chimneys are expectedly observed in the large puddles, the distance between two chimneys depending linearly on the capillary length. Finally, the Leidenfrost point, i.e. the temperature above which the Leidenfrost effect takes place, was unexpectedly found to increase slightly with gravity. A qualitative explanation based on a refined model (Sobac B. et al., Phys. Rev. E, 90 (2014) 053011) recognizing the non-trivial shape of the vapor film under the drop is proposed to explain this observation.

Displacement of an Electrically Charged Drop on a Vibrating Bath

In this work, the manipulation of an electrically charged droplet bouncing on a vertically vibrated bath is investigated. When a horizontal, uniform, and static electric field is applied to it, a motion is induced. The droplet is accelerated when the droplet is small. On the other hand, large droplets appear to move with a constant speed that depends linearly on the applied electrical field. In the latter regime, high-speed imaging of one bounce reveals that the droplet experiences an acceleration due to the electrical force during the flight and decelerates to 0 when interacting with the surface of the bath. Thus, the droplet moves with a constant average speed on a large time scale. We propose a criterion based on the force necessary to move a charged droplet at the surface of the bath to discriminate between constant speed and accelerated droplet regimes.