Communication: Evaporation: Influence of heat transport in the liquid on the interface temperature and the particle flux.

Molecular dynamics simulations are reported for the evaporation of a liquid into vacuum, where a Lennard-Jones type fluid with truncated and shifted potential at 2.5σ is considered. Vacuum is enforced locally by particle deletion and the liquid is thermostated in its bulk so that heat flows to the planar interface driving stationary evaporation. The length of the non-thermostated transition region between the bulk liquid and the interface Ln is under study. First, it is found for the reduced bulk liquid temperature Tl/Tc = 0.74 (Tc is the critical temperature) that by increasing Ln from 5.2σ to 208σ the interface temperature Ti drops by 17% and the evaporation flux decreases by a factor of 4.4. From a series of simulations for increasing values of Ln, an asymptotic value Ti (∞) of the interface temperature for Ln → ∞ can be estimated which is 21% lower than the bulk liquid temperature Tl. Second, it is found that the evaporation flux is solely determined by the interface temperature Ti, independent on Tl or Ln. Combining these two findings, the evaporation coefficient α of a liquid thermostated on a macroscopic scale is estimated to be α ≈ 0.14 for Tl/Tc = 0.74.