Capillary flow of evaporating liquid solutions in open rectangular microchannels

Capillary flow of liquids plays a key role in many applications including lab-on-a-chip devices, heat pipes and printed electronics manufacturing. Open rectangular microchannels often appear these applications, with the lack top resulting complex free-surface morphology evaporation. In this work we develop theoretical model based on lubrication theory kinetically limited evaporation to examine capillary evaporating liquid solutions open connected circular reservoirs. The accounts for morphology, solvent evaporation, Marangoni flows due gradients solute concentration temperature finite-size reservoir effects. Significant differences are predicted behaviour between pure transport. found promote more uniform deposition patterns after Model predictions meniscus position evolution good agreement prior capillary-flow experiments aqueous poly(vinyl alcohol) presence reveals that principal mechanism through which influences is increase viscosity concentration.