how come spilled water inside and outside evaporates so quickly despite water’s evaporation point bring 100°, no where near the ambient temperature in home or outside?
In: 365
They way I have heard it is:
Water molecules when liquid are always ‘wiggling’ around.
At 0 degrees, or ice, or molecules are wiggling around at all, so it stays solid and no molecules escape.
At 100 degrees, or boiling, all or nearly all the molecules are wiggling around and can escape into steam or vapour (they are different, steam is invisible).
In between 0 and 100 degrees the amount of wiggling is different depending how close to either temperature it is, but some are always wiggling with enough energy to escape or evaporate away.
That’s why at 30 degrees outside things evaporate and at 40 degrees they evaporate faster and so on.
So you are asking how evaporation works if I understand your question right.
Above absolute zero particles jiggle around. They all have some velocity and lets quickly make kinetic energy of that velocity and say that the average kinetic energy of the molecules is the temperature of the substance. But since we tend to have a lot of molecules ~10²³ at least even if there is a very low probability that we happen to find a very fast molecule we will find a bunch of them. Near the surface where in one direction there aren’t a lot of water molecules to bump into these few fast molecules can from time to time escape, literally shoot out into the air because they just happened to get knocked in the right direction by not one or two neighbours but 3 or more. Thats unlikely to happen but given ~10²³ molecules we will see surprisingly fast ones. The cloaser we are to boiling the more likely we are to find faster molecules.
If we introduce some outside effect like moving air we can help some of these fast molecules to escape. But here is an interesting phenomenon. By helping the fast molecules shoot out you make the water cooler. Since temperature is just the average kinetic energy of the molecules if the really fast once leave that will decrease the average and so the temperature. Thats part of the reason why blowing on hot food like soup will help it cool down. But the more dominant effect usually is that by blowing you supply cooler air and maintain a large temperature difference which will make the cooling faster.
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