arXiv subjects

Mathis Fricke

Publications and source records attributed to Mathis Fricke.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

A geometry-based model for spreading drops applied to drops on a silicon wafer and a swellable polymer brush film

We investigate the dynamics of spreading in a regime where the shape of the drop is close to a spherical cap. The latter simplification is applicable in the late (viscous) stage of spreading for highly viscous drops with a diameter below the capillary length. Moreover, it applies to the spreading of a drop on a swellable polymer brush, where the complex interaction with the substrate leads to a very slow spreading dynamics. The spherical cap geometry allows to derive a closed ordinary differential equation (ODE) for the spreading if the capillary number is a function of the contact angle as it is the case for empirical contact angle models. The latter approach has been introduced by de Gennes (Reviews of Modern Physics, 1985) for small contact angles. In the present work, we generalize the method to arbitrary contact angles. The method is applied to experimental data of spreading water-glycerol drops on a silicon wafer and spreading water drops on a PNIPAm coated silicon wafer. It is found that the ODE-model is able to describe the spreading kinetics in the case of partial wetting. Moreover, the model can predict the spreading dynamics of spherical cap-shaped droplets if the relationship between the contact angle and the capillary number is universal.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2020

Contact line advection using the geometrical Volume-of-Fluid method

We consider the interface advection problem by a prescribed velocity field in the special case when the interface intersects the domain boundary, i.e. in the presence of a contact line. This problem emerges from the discretization of continuum models for dynamic wetting. The kinematic evolution equation for the dynamic contact angle (Fricke et al., 2019) expresses the fundamental relationship between the rate of change of the contact angle and the structure of the transporting velocity field. The goal of the present work is to develop an interface advection method that is consistent with the fundamental kinematics and transports the contact angle correctly with respect to a prescribed velocity field. In order to verify the advection method, the kinematic evolution equation is solved numerically and analytically (for special cases). We employ the geometrical Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) method on a structured Cartesian grid to solve the hyperbolic transport equation for the interface in two spatial dimensions. We introduce generalizations of the Youngs and ELVIRA methods to reconstruct the interface close to the domain boundary. Both methods deliver first-order convergent results for the motion of the contact line. However, the Boundary Youngs method shows strong oscillations in the numerical contact angle that do not converge with mesh refinement. In contrast to that, the Boundary ELVIRA method provides linear convergence of the numerical contact angle transport.

math.NA↗

arXiv2019

A Kinematic Evolution Equation for the Dynamic Contact Angle and some Consequences

We investigate the moving contact line problem for two-phase incompressible flows with a kinematic approach. The key idea is to derive an evolution equation for the contact angle in terms of the transporting velocity field. It turns out that the resulting equation has a simple structure and expresses the time derivative of the contact angle in terms of the velocity gradient at the solid wall. Together with the additionally imposed boundary conditions for the velocity, it yields a more specific form of the contact angle evolution. Thus, the kinematic evolution equation is a tool to analyze the evolution of the contact angle. Since the transporting velocity field is required only on the moving interface, the kinematic evolution equation also applies when the interface moves with its own velocity independent of the fluid velocity. We apply the developed tool to a class of moving contact line models which employ the Navier slip boundary condition. We derive an explicit form of the contact angle evolution for sufficiently regular solutions, showing that such solutions are unphysical. Within the simplest model, this rigorously shows that the contact angle can only relax to equilibrium if some kind of singularity is present at the contact line. Moreover, we analyze more general models including surface tension gradients at the contact line, slip at the fluid-fluid interface and mass transfer across the fluid-fluid interface.

physics.flu-dyn↗