Automated measurement of the number and growth of water droplets in mixed convection

Abstract

Condensation of humid air at subcooled surfaces occurs in various technical applications i.e. windows, camera lenses, windshields or headlights. Misting of these surfaces is unwanted or even poses a safety risk. Providing a better understanding of the associated mass transfer during evaporation or condensation is the requirement for solving such problems and is the aim of our work. Considering the latter, the vast majority of publications investigate condensation of steam with small fractions of non-condensable gas, while the aforementioned applications are exposed to low fractions of water vapor. The mass transfer in channel flow has been reported by i.e. Zheng et al. [1] or Westhoff et al. [2] but is rarely investigated in experimental studies with more complex flow structures.