Effect of Marangoni forces on interfacial heat and mass transfer driven by surface cooling

A fully resolved numerical study was performed to investigate interfacial heat and mass transfer enhanced by the fully developed Rayleigh–Bénard–Marangoni instability in a relatively deep domain. The instability was triggered by evaporative cooling modelled by a constant surface heat flux. The latter allowed for temperature-induced variations in surface tension giving rise to Marangoni forces reinforcing the Rayleigh instability. Simulations were performed at a fixed Rayleigh number ( ${\textit{Ra}}_h$ ) and a variety of Marangoni numbers ( ${\textit{Ma}}_h$ ). In each simulation, scalar transport equations for heat and mass concentration at various Schmidt numbers ( ${\textit{Sc}}=16{-}200$ ) were solved simultaneously. Due to the fixed (warm) temperature prescribed at the bottom of the computational domain, large buoyant plumes emerged quasi-periodically both at the top and bottom. With increasing Marangoni number a decrease in the average convection cell size at the surface was observed, with a simultaneous improvement in near-surface mixing. The presence of high aspect ratio rectangular convection cell footprints was found to be characteristic for Marangoni-dominated flows. Due to the promotion of interfacial mass transfer by Marangoni forces, the power in the scaling of the mass transfer velocity, $K_{\!L}\!\propto\! \textit{Sc}^{-n}$ , was found to decrease from $n=0.50$ at ${\textit{Ma}}_h=0$ to $\approx 0.438$ at ${\textit{Ma}}_h=13.21\times 10^5$ . Finally, the existence of a buoyancy-dominated and a Marangoni-dominated regime was investigated in the context of the interfacial heat and mass transfer scaling as a function of ${\textit{Ma}}_h+\varepsilon {\textit{Ra}}_h$ , where $\varepsilon$ is a small number determined empirically.