Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 4: Statistical Physics (general) II
DY 4.3: Talk
Monday, March 22, 2010, 14:30–14:45, H47
Size Distribution and Correlation Functions of Hanging Dew Droplets — •Tobias Lapp1, Johannes Blaschke1, Andrew Scullion2, Jürgen Vollmer1, and Björn Hof1 — 1MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, 37073 Göttingen, Germany — 2Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6
The formation, growth and coarsening of dew droplets on flat surfaces has widely been studied in the physics literature under the keyword "Breath Figures". As an experimental setup we built a vapor chamber not too dissimilar to a steam cooker: A cell with water is heated from below. The water partially evaporates and condenses on a cooled ceiling plate. Applying a dark field illumination technique yields high resolution images of the droplets that we analyze to measure the droplet size distribution and the pair correlation function of droplets.
We compare the experimental data to numerical simulations to investigate how the interplay of coalescence and dripping of droplets yields locally correlated droplet patterns. Moreover, we use the pair correlation function to formulate a Boltzmann equation for the evolution of the size distribution.