Unraveling the fundamentals of transport across the vapor-liquid interface

Project Information

InterLab

Grant agreement ID: 101115669

DOI

10.3030/101115669

EC signature date 4 October 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 098,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 098,00

Coordinated by

NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - InterLab (Unraveling the fundamentals of transport across the vapor-liquid interface)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2026-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Transport of heat and mass across vapor-liquid interfaces is crucial in many examples of practical relevance such as the growth of rain droplet, the efficiency of distillation columns and the evaporation of oceans.
Experiments have documented that there can be a large temperature-jump across vapor-liquid interfaces, representing a resistance to heat and mass transport. There are no predictive models available that can reproduce experimental results within an acceptable accuracy.
This motivates the primary objectives of this project: Develop theory and methods to reproduce evaporation rates from steady-state experiments with water and octane within an accuracy of 10%, where pressure is measured to an accuracy of ±0.3 Pa (water) and ±2.7 Pa (octane), and the heat flux is extracted from the temperature measurements to an accuracy of ±6%
The practical impact if the project succeeds is a validated, predictive theory that can represent heat and mass transport across vapor-liquid interfaces within a high accuracy, that has been validated with experiments.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Here are main achievements from this project that have been or will shortly be published in the open literature:

- The viscosity, thermal conductivity and diffusion coefficients of the Lennard-Jones fluid have been comprehensively characterized and represented by use of many theoretical and semi-empirical models.
- New fundamental transfer lengths have been derived for Revised Enskog Theory, enabling prediction of transport properties also at higher, liquid-like densities based only on molecular information.
- A new methodology to extrapolate into the metastable and unstable domains of the phase diagram and map interfacial properties have been developed.
- Density functional theory for fluids have also been evaluated in vicinity of solid surfaces.
- The intrinsic surface methodology has been used to study interfaces and their resistances both at and beyond equilibrium.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The extension of revised enskog theory to higher densities represents a significant step beyond the present state of the art. We are also currently in the process of unravelling the fundamental mechanism of transport across vapor-liquid interfaces, and more information with details will be submitted to a journal in the near future.