Marangoni convection in binary mixtures.

Marangoni instabilities in binary mixtures in the presence of the Soret effect and evaporation are different from those in pure liquids. In contrast to a large amount of experimental work on Marangoni convection in pure liquids, such experiments in binary mixtures are not available in the literature, to our knowledge. Using binary mixtures of NaCl/water in an open system, evaporation of water molecules at the liquid-vapor interface is inevitable. We have systematically investigated the pattern formation for a set of substrate temperatures and solute concentrations in an open system. The flow patterns evolve with time, driven by surface-tension fluctuations due to evaporation and the Soret effect, while the air-liquid interface does not deform. A shadow-graph method is used to follow the pattern formation in time. The patterns are mainly composed of polygons and rolls. The mean pattern size first decreases slightly, and then gradually increases during the evolution. Evaporation affects the pattern formation mainly at the early stages and the local evaporation rate tends to become spatially uniform at the film surface. The Soret effect becomes important at the later stages and affects the mixture for a large mean solute concentration where the Soret number is significantly above zero. The strength of convection increases with the initial solute concentration and the substrate temperature. Our findings differ from the theoretical predictions in which evaporation is neglected.