Kinetic boundary layers in gas mixtures: Systems described by nonlinearly coupled kinetic and hydrodynamic equations and applications to droplet condensation and evaporation

Abstract

We consider a mixture of heavy vapor molecules and a light carrier gas surrounding a liquid droplet. The vapor is described by a variant of the Klein-Kramers equation, a kinetic equation for Brownian particles moving in a spatially inhomogeneous background; the gas is described by the Navier-Stokes equations; the droplet acts as a heat source due to the released heat of condensation. The exchange of momentum and energy between the constituents of the mixture is taken into account by force terms in the kinetic equation and source terms in the Navier-Stokes equations. These are chosen to obtain maximal agreement with the irreversible thermodynamics of a gas mixture. The structure of the kinetic boundary layer around the sphere is then determined from the self-consistent solution of this set of coupled equations with appropriate boundary conditions at the surface of the sphere. For this purpose the kinetic equation is rewritten as a set of coupled moment equations. A complete set of solutions of these moment equations is constructed by numerical integration inward from the region far away from the droplet, where the background inhomogeneities are small. A technique developed in an earlier paper is used to deal with the severe numerical instability of the moment equations. The solutions so obtained for given temperature and pressure profiles in the gas are then combined linearly in such a way that they obey the boundary conditions at the droplet surface; from this solution source terms for the Navier-Stokes equation of the gas are constructed and used to determine improved temperature and pressure profiles for the background gas. For not too large temperature differences between the droplet and the gas at infinity, self-consistency is reached after a few iterations. The method is applied to the condensation of droplets from a supersaturated vapor, where small but significant corrections to an earlier, not fully consistent version of the theory are found, as well as to strong evaporation of droplets under the influence of an external heat source, where corrections of up to 40 % are obtained.