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This work investigates stationary evaporation and condensation dynamics across diffuse liquid-vapor interfaces to probe non-equilibrium phase-change behaviors absent from standard models. Understanding these phenomena is critical because widespread interfacial models enforce uniqueness constraints that misrepresent boundary behavior in fluid simulations and scientific modeling. The authors find that the inviscid limit permits symmetric evaporation and condensation fluxes even below saturation pressure, while viscous effects break this symmetry to produce multiple stable condensation states for a single vapor condition—a behavior confirmed dynamically through Lattice Boltzmann simulations.
Identical thermodynamic conditions can support both evaporation and condensation below saturation pressure, upending classical assumptions that phase-change flux must be uniquely determined by local vapor states.
Using diffuse-interface theory, we uncover unexpected phase-change phenomena that are absent from widely used models of evaporation and condensation. In the inviscid limit, the same adjacent thermodynamic states admit stationary evaporation and condensation with equal and opposite mass fluxes, even when the vapor pressure lies below saturation. Viscosity breaks this reversibility but gives rise to multiple stationary condensation rates for the same vapor state. Lattice Boltzmann simulations dynamically recover these states, showing that these phenomena are dynamically realized by the diffuse-interface equations rather than arising solely as mathematical solutions of the reduced interfacial relations. Our results reveal previously unexplored behavior in a well-established theory of liquid--vapor interfaces.