Photomolecular Effect Leading to Water Evaporation Exceeding Thermal Limit · HackerPapers discussions

Photomolecular Effect Leading to Water Evaporation Exceeding Thermal Limit — mentioned by elil17

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 22:37:16 GMT

Worth noting that I’m going off the preprint since I don’t have PNAS access. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10385.pdf

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Photomolecular Effect Leading to Water Evaporation Exceeding Thermal Limit — mentioned by svnt

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 17:38:47 GMT

An earlier discovery draft paper is freely available, but only guesses at mechanisms: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10385.pdf This is one of those things that seems fairly obvious once pointed out: that the energy in light might be sufficient to directly break hydrogen bonds and separate water molecules from surfaces, especially in regions where water's absorption is low. This is a separate process from thermal gain (from any source, including light) heating and phase-changing the water. I don't know if this is right but I'll put something forth to sanity check it: 0) say the energy required to…

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Photomolecular Effect Leading to Water Evaporation Exceeding Thermal Limit — mentioned by Someone

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 17:34:21 GMT

I found https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10385.pdf by the same authors. If I read it correctly, it says the theoretical limit for thermal evaporation is 1.45 kg/(m²h), while experimentally, values as high as 4-5 kg/(m²h) and over 10 kg/(m²h) have been reported in two-, respectively three-dimensional structures. That’s a huge difference, but in my uneducated opinion not likely to be completely caused by this effect. Edit: reading https://news.mit.edu/2023/surprising-finding-light-makes-wat..., which says “and the excess has been significant — a doubling, or even a tripling or more, of the…

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