Prosperetti, AndreaPlesset, Milton S.2020-03-102020-03-101984-07Copyright 1984 Physics of Fluids. Recommended citation: Prosperetti, Andrea, and Milton S. Plesset. "The stability of an evaporating liquid surface." The Physics of fluids 27, no. 7 (1984): 1590-1602. DOI: 10.1063/1.864814 URL: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.864814 Reproduced in accordance with the original publisher’s licensing terms and with permission from the author(s).https://hdl.handle.net/10657/6067A linearized stability analysis is carried out for an evaporating liquid surface with a view of understanding some observations with highly superheated liquids. The analytical results of this study depend on the unperturbed temperature near the liquid surface. The absence of this data renders a comparison with experiment impossible. However, on the basis of several different assumptions for this temperature distribution, instabilities of the interface of a rapidly evaporating liquid are found for a range of wavenumbers of the surface wave perturbation. At large evaporating mass flow rates the instability is very strong with growth times of a millisecond or less. A discussion of the physical mechanism leading to the instability is given.en-USFluid flowsSurface wavesLiquidsarticle