Hydrodynamic Collapse of the Leidenfrost Vapor Layer

Abstract: During the Leidenfrost effect, a stable vapor film can separate a hot solid from an evaporating liquid. Eventually, after formation and upon cooling, the vapor layer cannot be sustained and undergoes a violent collapse evidenced by explosive boiling. Computationally, modeling this instability involves an interplay between hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, rapid evaporation, and length-scales from $\mu$m to cm. Selective assumptions, made to reduce computational costs, have limited most previous studies to steady-state investigations. Here, we combine two-phase laminar flow, heat transfer, and evaporation in a finite-element simulation to examine the failure of Leidenfrost vapor layers during cooling. During periods of quiescence, the geometry of the vapor layer agrees well with steady-state lubrication theory. In the simulations, we report the local temperature of the solid at failure, $T_-$, which provides a lower bound for recent experimental work using the same geometric and material conditions. Surprisingly, we find that inertial forces, which are typically ignored in theoretical treatments of the vapor layer, are responsible for initiating the instability leading to failure.