Emergy transport by surface tension-driven convection

水在我们的日常生活中扮演着如此重要的角色，它理所当然地受到了巨大的科学关注；然而，水中分子相互作用的极性性质使其成为最难理解的物质之一。这些相互作用已被发现赋予水一种以前未曾定义的表面性质，即表面热容量。这一性质决定了表面张力驱动的对流所输送的热能。当水在没有强迫或自然对流的情况下蒸发时，以及在辐射可以忽略的低温下，人们一直认为只有热传导将热能输送到发生相变过程的水-蒸汽界面。但这些最近的研究表明，如果蒸发器的设计是表面张力驱动对流活跃的，那么表面张力驱动对流传输到界面的热能可以支配通过热传导传输的热能！在我们的一些实验中，表面张力驱动的对流输送了以测量的速度蒸发液体所需能量的60%。一旦了解了这种新的能量传输方式，就设计、制造和测试了一种新型蒸发器。事实证明，它是一种比传统蒸发器更高效的蒸发器，多伦多大学已经为该蒸发器申请了专利，并成立了一家以开发该专利为目标的公司。我们提出了四个相互关联的项目，它们的目标是加深我们对水的表面热容量的理解，并扩大它的应用范围。

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.