Phase Field/Fluctuating Hydrodynamics Approach for Bubble Nucleation
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Published:2018
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Vapour bubbles form in liquids by two main mechanisms: boiling, by increasing the temperature over the boiling threshold, and cavitation, by reducing the pressure below the vapour pressure threshold. The liquid can be held in these metastable states (overheating and tensile conditions, respectively) for a long time without forming bubbles. Bubble nucleation is indeed an activated process, requiring a significant amount of energy to overcome the free energy barrier and bring the liquid from the metastable conditions to the thermodynamically stable state where vapour is observed. Nowadays molecular dynamics is the unique tool to investigate such thermally activated processes. However, its computational cost limits its application to small systems (less than few tenth of nanometers) and to very short times, preventing the study of hydrodynamic interactions. In this work a continuum diffuse interface model of the two-phase fluid has been embedded with thermal fluctuations in the context of the so-called Fluctuating Hydrodynamics (FH), enabling the description of the liquid-vapour transition in extended systems and the evaluation of bubble nucleation rates in different metastable conditions by means of numerical simulations. Such an approach is expected to have a huge impact on the understanding of the nucleation dynamics since, by reducing the computational cost by orders of magnitude, it allows the unique possibility of investigating systems of realistic dimensions on macroscopic time scales.