Friday, 2 January 2015

thermodynamics - water spheres on a hot pan


Today accidently I poured a little bit of water on a very hot pan , and something weird happened , where the quantity of water split into smaller spheres that moved around fast in the pan. I'm wondering about the physics concept behind that..



Answer



This is called the Leidenfrost effect. When water is sprinkled on the hot pan, the water surface immediately in contact with the hot pan vapourises. This vapour surface insulates the rest of the droplet from vapourising. Now a liquid droplet exists over vapour. The hot vapour has a lot of energy and moves around rapidly, the water droplet moves along with the vapour.


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