Skin formation in evaporating colloidal droplets

Abstract

When a droplet containing a concentrated suspension evaporates in a dry environment, a layer often forms at the interface accumulating non-volatile material. Such a "skin layer" experiences strong stresses and eventually turns mechanically unstable at the last stage of evaporation. Predicting the formation of such skin layer or particle shell and its properties is a crucial problem for applications and constitutes a multi-scale problem, from the micro/nanoscopic scale of the particles to the millimetric size of the droplets. Interestingly, its physical description lies at the interface between deterministic macroscopic evaporation models and microscopic stochastic particles interactions and diffusion. In this work we present a general theoretical approach to obtain the time-dependent particle concentration profile in an implicit manner, for the general case of diffusion-limited evaporation of spherical droplets, and more generally to all 1D non linear diffusion-limited cases with particles pressure and mobility terms of rational form. This approach is compared successfully to numerical solutions obtained using a finite element solver in the limit of high P\'eclet numbers, and to 2D Brownian dynamics simulations. Our results show that the concentration profiles and shell formation onset depend nontrivially on the initial packing fraction. By analyzing these profiles, we determine the position where the glassy layer forms, whose formation is expected to play a critical role in shell buckling. This model provides a robust framework for predicting the size and maximum aspect ratio of the resulting clusters.