A new comprehensive analysis of Stefan’s flow caused by a free growing
droplet in the vapor-gas atmosphere with several condensing components is
presented. This analysis, based on the nonstationary heat and material balance
and diffusion transport equations, shows the appearance of the Stefan inflow in
the vicinity of the growing droplet and the Stefan outflow at large distances from
the droplet as a consequence of nonisothermal condensation. For an ensemble
of droplets in the atmospheric cloud, this outflow provides an increase of the
total volume of the cloud, which can be treated as cloud thermal expansion
and leads to the rise of the cloud as a whole due to increasing its buoyancy. We
have formulated the self-similar solutions of the nonstationary diffusion and heat
conduction equations for a growing multicomponent droplet and have derived
analytical expressions for the nonstationary velocity profile of Stefan’s flow and
the expansion volume of the vapor-gas mixture around the growing droplet. To
illustrate the a
