Experimental results on evaporation waves

Abstract

We address an experimental investigation of evaporation waves. They are obtained when a liquid contained in a vertical glass tube is suddenly depressurized from a high initial pressure down to the atmospheric one. After the release of pressure, the state of the liquid, which is at ambient pressure and the initial temperature, is well known to be metastable when the corresponding stable state is vapour. For moderately large evaporation rates (moderately large initial to ambient pressure ratios), the vapour-liquid interface ultimately evolves into an evaporation wave in which a highly corrugated front propagates downwards into the liquid with a well defined mean velocity. This mean velocity turns out to be a function of the ratio between the initial and the ambient pressures. In addition, attention to some new phenomena not previously reported is brought.