International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol.127, 660-664, 2018
Suppression of the condensational growth of droplets of a levitating cluster using the modulation of the laser heating power
The relatively stable clusters of regularly positioned small droplets formed over the locally heated water surface have been studied starting from the early paper by the first author. The life of a cluster appeared to be not long because of growing of droplets due to condensation of steam and the final coalescence of large droplets with the substrate layer of water. However, further laboratory studies of biochemical processes in single droplets will be possible only in the case of their longer life. One way to stabilize the cluster suggested recently by the authors is an external infrared heating which prevents growing of droplets. The present paper is focused on another way to stabilize the cluster. This is an expected rebuilding of droplet clusters at periodic changes in power of the heating laser beam. The frequency of these oscillations is more important than their amplitude because of the resonance nature of the phenomenon. The experiments showed that in the simplest variant of alternating constant power values with the same duration of heating, the droplet growth rate is approximately twice reduced with a power modulation period of about 0.9 s. It means that such a "rejuvenescence" procedure can be used at laboratory conditions to prolong the life of levitating droplet clusters. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.