Eli5: Why is that water doesn’t evaporate immediately on a very hot surface?
In: Physics
Others have mentioned the Leidenfrost effect, which does insulate the water from the hot surface on a layer of steam, but that’s only part of it.
The other part is that when water evaporates, it takes its heat with it. Heat is just energy and evaporation is just water molecules with enough energy to leave the liquid. It’s why sweating cools you down.
So not only do you have to deal with an insulating layer of steam, but you also have to transfer enough heat into the rest of the water while lost of that heat is being taken away by the evaporating water, massively slowing down the rate at which the rest of the water heats up.
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