Evaporatively driven morphological instability

Abstract

Simple observations of evaporating solutions reveal a complex hierarchy of spatio-temporal instabilities. We analyze one such instability suggested by the qualitative observations of Du and Stone and find that it is driven by a novel variant of the classical {\em morphological instability} in alloy solidification. In the latter case a moving solid-liquid interface is accompanied by a solutally enriched boundary layer that is thermodynamically metastable due to {\em constitutional supercooling}. Here, we consider the evaporation of an impure film adjacent to a solid composed of the nonvolatile species. In this case, constitutional supercooling within the film is created by evaporation at the solution-vapor interface and this drives the corrugation of the solid--solution interface across the thickness of the film. The principal points of this simple theoretical study are to suggest an instability mechanism that is likely operative across a broad range of technological and natural systems and to focus future quantitative experimental searches.