Assessment of the statistical rate theory expression for evaporation mass flux

A comparative study of experiments and theories on steady-state evaporation of water

“…Mass transport across the liquid-vapor interface is frequently described, assuming a uniform temperature across the interface and with the vapor pressure equal to the equilibrium saturation pressure [10,11] . This, however, neglects the resistance of the interface itself and contradicts observations of temperature jumps at the liquid-vapor interface during steady-state evaporation of water [12][13][14] . Here, temperature jumps as large as 27.83 K have been reported [12] .…”

“…Also, systematic measurement errors close to the liquid-vapor interface have been discussed [27] . Steady-state water evaporation experiments, recently presented by Kazemi and Ward [14] , have to the best of our knowledge, the highest accuracy reported to date. The collected experimental data now spans a wide range of measured fluxes and temperature jumps.…”

“…Since the first experiments of Ward and Fang [20,21] , there have been many experimental efforts aimed at mapping the characteristics of steady-state evaporation of water [12][13][14][22][23][24] . The experiments differ by many factors, such as the induced energy fluxes and the obtained evaporation rates.…”

“…In SRT, introduced by Ward and Fang [20] , the evaporation rate is calculated by use of transition probabilities between quantum mechanical states. The flux of molecules going from one phase to the other is related to the transition probabilities in both directions [14] . SRT applies to all fluids, and no fitting parameters are needed.…”

“…In this work we shall critically assess six different experimental data sets containing in total 159 single experiments [13,14,[22][23][24] and evaluate their consistency. The different data sets will be used to compare and assess the three state-of-the-art theories.…”