Interactive Evaporation of Neighboring Pendant and Sessile Droplet Pair

In this article, we experimentally probe the vapor-mediated interaction behavior of evaporating sessile and pendant droplets in an interacting droplet (ID) system. For this purpose, a pendant droplet was introduced in the vapor diffusion domain of a sessile droplet and both were allowed to evaporate simultaneously. The evaporation dynamics were monitored using optical imaging techniques for varied separation (both horizontal and vertical) distances between them. Our observations reveal curtailed mass transfer rate from both the droplets although the evolution of droplet morphology (such as pendant droplet radius, contact radius, and contact angle of sessile droplet) at different stages of evaporation remain similar. The evaporative fluxes from these two droplets interact with one another and thereby reduce the diffusive mobility of vapor molecules in the liquid–vapor interface of both. This condition suppresses the diffusion mechanism and thereby impedes the evaporation rate. We show that the evaporation behavior for two droplets in an interacting droplet system is solely dictated by an effective external vapor concentration depending on the problem geometry. Therefore, to characterize the vapor diffusion domain we hypothesize a vapor front enfolding both the droplets and put forward a theoretical model by applying conservation of mass across it. We also propose a relationship to show the variation of the effective external vapor concentration with the relative separation distance between the droplets. The predictions from theoretical models are found to be in good agreement with our detailed experimental observations.