Leidenfrost drops: Effect of gravity

¹ GRASP, Département de Physique B5, Université de Liège - B-4000 Liège, Belgium
² TIPs, Fluid Physics Unit, Université Libre de Bruxelles - C.P. 165/67, B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
³ Institut Lumière Matière, UMR5306 CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 F-69622 Villeurbanne CEDEX, France

Received: 24 December 2014
Accepted: 7 April 2015

Abstract

A specific experimental set-up has been installed in a large centrifuge facility in order to study different aspects of Leidenfrost drops under high-gravity conditions (5, 10, 15 and 20 times the Earth gravity). In particular, the drop lifetime and more precisely the variations of drop diameter vs. time have shown to be in good agreement with previous experiments and scaling analysis (Biance A.-L. et al., Phys. Fluids, 15 (2003) 1632). Moreover, so-called chimneys are expectedly observed in the large puddles, the distance between two chimneys depending linearly on the capillary length. Finally, the Leidenfrost point, i.e. the temperature above which the Leidenfrost effect takes place, was unexpectedly found to increase slightly with gravity. A qualitative explanation based on a refined model (Sobac B. et al., Phys. Rev. E, 90 (2014) 053011) recognizing the non-trivial shape of the vapor film under the drop is proposed to explain this observation.