Emergy transport by surface tension-driven convection

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Water plays such an important role in our daily lives that it has justifiably received enormous scientific attention; however, the polar nature of the molecular interactions in water make it one of the most difficult substances to understand. These interactions have been found to give water a previously undefined surface property, the surface-thermal capacity. This property determines the amount of thermal energy transported by surface tension-driven convection. When water evaporates in the absence of forced or natural convection, and at low temperatures, where radiation is negligible, it had been thought that only thermal conduction transported thermal energy to the water-vapour interface where the phase change process takes place. But these recent studies have indicated that if the design of the evaporator is such that surface tension driven- convection is active, then the thermal energy transported to the interface by surface tension-driven convection can dominate that transported by thermal conduction! In some of our experiments, surface tension-driven convection transported up to 60% of the energy required to evaporate the liquid at the measured rate. Once this new mode of energy transport was understood, a new type of evaporator was designed, built and tested. It proved to be a more efficient evaporator than conventional evaporators, and the University of Toronto has applied for a patent on the evaporator, and established a company that has as its objective the exploitation of the patent. We propose four interrelated projects that have as their objective furthering our understanding of the surface-thermal capacity of water, and extending the range over which it can be applied.