Simulations of Meniscus Motion and Evaporation for Convective Deposition Manufacturing

J. Xiao, and D. Attinger
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Published in 2010

Convective deposition is a material processing technique where an evaporating meniscus of a colloidal suspension is dragged along a solid substrate to deposit layers of micro or nanoparticles. The process is a typical multiphysics process where fluid dynamics, mass and heat transfer come into play in a small deforming domain. In this work, we describe an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Euler model implemented in COMSOL that simulates the evaporation of a 2D meniscus of pure liquid sheared between a blade and a solid substrate. We investigate the internal flow structure as a function of the wetting angle and the relative speed. The curvature and evaporative flux are expressed as a function of the velocity, relative humidity and substrate temperature. Comparisons between experiments and modeling are made and discussed.

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