Abstract:
We describe experiments on Marangoni convection in thin evaporating liquid films. The films are binary mixtures of ethanol and water exposed to the ambient room air during all experimental runs. These experiments exhibit a variety of different, often novel, patterns, depending on the concentration (weight fraction) c of ethanol. Among these are mobile circular convective patterns, which have not been previously observed, to our knowledge. The convective patterns evolve due to the evaporation of both the solvent and the solute, and their size increases substantially with the initial concentration c. The patterns reported here differ from those found in binary mixtures of NaCl and water, where only water evaporates. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.