Ostwald ripening in evaporating respiratory breath figures

Kilbride, JJ, Ouali, FF ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6530-6786 and Fairhurst, DJ, 2025. Ostwald ripening in evaporating respiratory breath figures. Physical Review Fluids, 10 (10): L101601. ISSN 2469-990X

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Abstract

Understanding collective evaporation of micron-sized breath droplets can enhance modeling of clouds and inform strategies to limit virus transmission. In this work, we analyze thousands of micron-sized droplets within human and pure water breath figures, identifying two regimes. First, during coarsening, whilst the entire array is evaporating, larger droplets grow at the expense of smaller ones, driven by differences in equilibrium vapor concentration as low as 0.02%, arising from varying interfacial curvature. In this regime, the temporal distribution of droplet radii behaves according to classic Ostwald ripening theory, a mechanism which is usually considered only for submicron droplets. We then use a mean field model to connect droplet evaporation theory with Ostwald ripening, and predict individual droplet dynamics, showing how the accuracy depends on droplet coverage fraction. Finally, we show how the Coarsening regime is terminated by an edge regime, in which all remaining droplets evaporate rapidly.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Physical Review Fluids
Creators:	Kilbride, J.J., Ouali, F.F. and Fairhurst, D.J.
Publisher:	American Physical Society
Date:	3 October 2025
Volume:	10
Number:	10
ISSN:	2469-990X
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1103/6vms-ljj5 DOI 2509346 Other
Rights:	Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	20 Oct 2025 10:30
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2025 10:30
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54595

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