A model coupling the liquid and gas phases for a totally wetting evaporative meniscus

An hydrodynamic model has been developed to get a complete description of an evaporative meniscus in complete wetting configuration. The coupling between the liquid and gas is explicitly taken into account. Scaling laws are derived for the different domains of the meniscus and validated by numerical simulations. Results are compared with previous models of the literature that use the electrostatic analogy proposed by Deegan and co-authors to describe the evaporative flux. We show that the different approaches differ for the description of the tip of the meniscus in the domain corresponding to the decrease of the evaporative flux but lead to the same scaling for the apparent macroscopic contact angle.