Feeding, Scaling, Raining: The Size Distribution of Sessile and Suspended Droplets

Abstract:
I will revisit the growth of droplets subjected to a mass flux from supersaturated vapor. For sessile droplets, i.e., damp droplets growing on a surface, the well-known deviations between observations and the mean field-predictions are shown to arise from the cutoff of the droplet distribution at the length scale where droplets are nucleated. For suspended droplets, like rain droplets, I will discuss extensions to the Lifshitz-Slezov theory that account for the changes of the ambient conditions due to flow. Progress in both questions in achieved by adapting methods from nonlinear dynamics to help modeling a classical soft-matter problem.