How to estimate the amount of water condensing from air on a surface, given the air's temperature and relative humidity and how they change over time, the surface temperature, material's thermal properites, roughness and whatever else needs to be given about the air and surface?
For my purpose, we may assume the surface starts off dry, but the more general situation would be as interesting. If enough water condenses, it'll form drops and run off – can we account for that?
Are there some fairly simple formulas or rules of thumb? High accuracy is not needed; I'll be happy to get grams per sq meter per second (or whatever) to within a factor of two. (What if we wanted higher accuracy?)
Best Answer
So you want to know how much water a certain surface adsorbs. This is really dependent on the surface material/conditions. Check adsorption and relative humidity on Wikipedia. To where I have analyzed, it seems that there is about enough information in the two articles. I am not a specialist on the subject so I might be missing some important factor.