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Contact Line Instability Caused by Air Rim Formation under Nonsplashing Droplets
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Contact Line Instability Caused by Air Rim Formation under Nonsplashing Droplets

Min Pack, Paul Kaneelil, Hyoungsoo Kim and Ying Sun
Langmuir, v 34(17), pp 4962-4969
01 May 2018
PMID: 29620373

Abstract

Chemistry Chemistry, Multidisciplinary Chemistry, Physical Materials Science Materials Science, Multidisciplinary Physical Sciences Science & Technology Technology
Drop impact is fundamental to various natural and industrial processes such as rain-induced soil erosion and spray-coating technologies. The recent discovery of the role of air entrainment between the droplet and the impacting surface has produced numerous works, uncovering the unique physics that correlates the air film dynamics with the drop impact outcomes. In this study, we focus on the post-failure air entrainment dynamics for We numbers well below the splash threshold under different ambient pressures and elucidate the interfacial instabilities formed by air entrainment at the wetting front of impacting droplets on perfectly smooth, viscous films of constant thickness. A high-speed total internal reflection microscopy technique accounting for the Fresnel reflection at the drop-air interface allows for in situ measurements of an entrained air rim at the wetting front. The presence of an air rim is found to be a prerequisite to the interfacial instability which is formed when the capillary pressure in the vicinity of the contact line can no longer balance the increasing gas pressure near the wetting front. A critical capillary number for the air rim formation is experimentally identified above which the wetting front becomes unstable where this critical capillary number inversely scales with the ambient pressure. The contact line instabilities at relatively low We numbers (We similar to O(10)) observed in this study provide insight into the conventional understanding of hydrodynamic instabilities under drop impact which usually require We >> 10.

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20 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#6 Clean Water and Sanitation

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary
Chemistry, Physical
Materials Science, Multidisciplinary
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