We report on the evaporation of hexane from porous alumina and silicon membranes. These membranes contain billions of independent nanopores tailored to an ink-bottle shape, where a cavity several tens of nanometers in diameter is separated from the bulk vapor by a constriction. For alumina membranes with narrow enough constrictions, we demonstrate that cavity evaporation proceeds by cavitation. Measurements of the pressure dependence of the cavitation rate follow the predictions of the bulk, homogeneous, classical nucleation theory, definitively establishing the relevance of homogeneous cavitation as an evaporation mechanism in mesoporous materials. Our results imply that porous alumina membranes are a promising new system to study liquids in a deeply metastable state.
@article{arxiv.2007.03521,
title = {Direct observation of homogeneous cavitation in nanopores},
author = {V. Doebele and A. Benoit-Gonin and F. Souris and L. Cagnon and P. Spathis and P. E. Wolf and A. Grosman and M. Bossert and I. Trimaille and C. Noûs and E. Rolley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.03521},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
14 pages , 4 figures. Source files also contain Supplemental Material (Doebele_HomogeneousCavitationMembranes_SM.pdf)