Hidden in plain sight: How evaporation impacts the pendant drop method

The surface tension of a liquid, which drives most free surface flows at small scales, is often measured with the pendant drop method due to its simplicity and reliability. When the drop is suspended in air, controlling the ambient temperature and humidity is usually an afterthought, resulting in evaporation of the drop during the measurement.

Here, we investigate the effect of evaporation on the measured surface tension using experiments and numerical simulations.

In the experiments, we measured the evolution of the droplet temperature, which can drastically reduce by ∆T ≈ 10 K due to evaporative cooling, and thereby altering the measured surface tension by more than 1 mN/m. This finding can be reproduced by numerical simulations, which additionally allow for controlled investigations of the individual influences of further effects on the pendant drop method, namely shape deformations by evaporation-driven flows, natural convection & Stefan flow in the gas phase, thermal and solutal Marangoni flow and varying liquid mass densities. Experiments and simulations are conducted for both pure liquids and aqueous mixtures of glycerol and various diols.

Our findings are particularly pertinent to Marangoni flows which are driven by surface tension gradients, and which are consequently highly sensitive to measurement inaccuracies.Our results and insights have implications for various applications, ranging from inkjet printing to agricultural spray.