Related papers: The evaporation of concentrated polymer solutions …
We investigated theoretically water evaporation from concentrated supramolecular mixtures, such as solutions of polymers or amphiphilic molecules, using numerical resolutions of a one dimensional model based on mass transport equations.…
Pathogens contained in airborne respiratory droplets have been seen to remain infectious for periods of time that depend on the ambient temperature and humidity. In particular, regarding the humidity, the empirically least favorable…
In temperate climates, infection rates of enveloped viruses peak during the winter. While these seasonal trends are established in influenza and human coronaviruses, the mechanisms driving the variation remain poorly understood and thus…
The globally supported social distancing rules to prevent airborne transmission of COVID-19 assume small saliva droplets evaporate fast and large ones, which contain most viral copies, fall fast to the ground. However, during evaporation,…
We investigate three aspects of aerosol-mediated air-borne viral infection mechanisms on different length and time scales. First, we address the evolution of the size distribution of a non-interacting ensemble of droplets that are subject…
Understanding the mechanics of detrimental convective instabilities in drying polymer solutions is crucial in many applications such as the production of film coatings. It is well known that solvent evaporation in polymer solutions can lead…
Large scale molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the dispersion of nanoparticles (NPs) in a polymer film during solvent evaporation. As the solvent evaporates, a dense polymer-rich skin layer forms at the liquid/vapor interface,…
Recent theory and experiments have shown how the buildup of a high-concentration polymer layer at a one-dimensional solvent-air interface can lead to an evaporation rate that scales with time as $t^{-1/2}$ and that is insensitive to the…
One of the many unresolved questions that revolves around the Covid-19 pandemic is whether local outbreaks can depend on ambient conditions like temperature and relative humidity. In this paper, we develop a model that tries to explain and…
An analysis of the projectile motion in stagnant air is presented for an evaporating respiratory micro-droplet which has been ejected from the mouth as an isolated droplet. It is assumed that the air resistance is a nonlinear function of…
In this paper, diffusion in polymer solutions undergoing evaporation of solvent is modeled as a coupled heat and mass transfer problem with moving boundary condition within the framework of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The proposed…
The hydrophobic effect is the dominant force which drives a protein towards its native state, but its physics has not been thoroughly understood yet. We introduce an exactly solvable model of the solvation of non-polar molecules in water,…
The effect of evaporation on droplet sedimentation times is crucial for estimating the risk of infection from virus-containing airborne droplets. For droplet radii in the range 100 nm < R < 60 {\mu}m, evaporation can be described in the…
Saliva is primarily composed of water, but additionally includes a variety of organic and inorganic substances such as salt, proteins, peptides, mucins, virions, etc. The presence of such solutes affects the evaporation time of respiratory…
From pasta to biological tissues to contact lenses, gel and gel-like materials inherently soften as they swell with water. In dry, low-relative-humidity environments, these materials stiffen as they de-swell with water. Here, we use…
To explain reported solar interfacial-evaporation rates from porous materials beyond an apparent 100% efficiency using the thermal evaporation mechanism, many publications hypothesize that intermediate water inside porous materials have a…
Wicking is a widely studied process in both natural and artificial systems. In many industrial applications, such as heat pipes, the wicking liquid evaporates to regulate temperature effectively. This study focuses on a simpler scenario…
A large number of infectious diseases is transmitted by respiratory droplets. How long these droplets persist in the air, how far they can travel, and how long the pathogens they might carry survive are all decisive factors for the spread…
The interfacial resistance to evaporation, in particular for the case of water, is a longstanding issue. The previous data on its main characterizing parameter, the accommodation coefficient, manifest a dispersion over three orders of…
Viruses are known to tolerate wide ranges of pH and salt conditions and to withstand internal pressures as high as 100 atmospheres. In this paper we investigate the mechanical properties of viral capsids, calling explicit attention to the…