Eli5: Does hotter temperatures evaporate water faster when cooking?

Question

If I put a cup of water in an oven proof container and boil it in an oven at 400 degrees, and then do it with an oven at 500 degrees,

Will the hotter oven evaporate the water faster?

My thought is it will all evaporate at 212 but the hotter oven would make it to 212 faster. Aside from that, would a hotter temp make it happen faster if all other things were equal?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

Take it to an extreme comparison, one is a small camping stove slowly boiling a pot of water, the other is dropping a pot of water into the Sun. It would be weird if the nuclear furnace in the Sun *couldn’t* evaporate the water any faster than the small camping stove. If the pot was just sitting there, not melting, not evaporating, in the Sun for a couple of hours slowly steaming because the more energy couldn’t do anything to the water.

Another weird comparison is heating up steel red hot so it has some amount of energy in it – then dunking it in water, like a blacksmith does when making a horseshoe or sword. It hisses as the water next to it flashes to steam. Now heat up an Ocean Liner red hot and dunk it in the ocean. There’s a lot more energy involved in getting the Ocean Liner red hot because it’s so much bigger, imagine if it only hissed with a tiny poker’s worth of water flashing to steam from one end and nothing else happened and it just did that for months.

That the more energy somehow *couldn’t* evaporate more water per second. That would be really weird.

Yes, the more heat energy you can get into the water, the faster the water will evaporate away. The outside of the pot gets hot, the heat conducts through the pot, and into the water. The higher the heat difference, the faster conduction happens. The water touching the pot gets more energy more quickly from a more energetic (hotter) pot wall, that makes it evaporate more quickly and get out of the way of the rest of the water, which touches the pot quicker, heats up quicker. Same with the air to water boundary, the hotter air is molecules moving faster, hammering into the surface of the water more energetically, shoving more energy into the water more quickly.