Liquid morphologies and capillary forces between three spherical beads

Abstract

Equilibrium shapes of coalesced pendular bridges in a static assembly of spherical beads are computed by numerical minimization of the interfacial energy. Our present study focuses on generic bead configurations involving three beads, one of which is in contact to the two others while there is a gap of variable size between the latter. In agreement with previous experimental studies, we find interfacial `trimer' morphologies consisting of three coalesced pendular bridges, and `dimers' of two coalesced bridges. In a certain range of the gap opening we observe a bistability between the dimer and trimer morphology during shrinking and growth. The magnitude of the corresponding capillary forces in presence of a trimer or dimer depends, besides the gap opening only on the volume or Laplace pressure of liquid. For a given Laplace pressure, the capillary forces in presence of a trimer are slightly larger than the force of a single bridges at the same gap opening, which could explain the shallow maximum and plateau of the capillary cohesion of a wetting liquid for saturations in the funicular regime.

References in corpus (5)

• Wet Granular Materials
• A Unified Interpretation of Stress in Molecular Systems
• Grain Scale Modeling of Arbitrary Fluid Saturation in Random Packings
• Superfast non-linear diffusion: Capillary transport in particulate porous media
• The Role of Contact Angle Hysteresis for Fluid Transport in Wet Granular Matter

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Rheology and microstructure of unsaturated granular materials: Experiments and simulations
• The behavior of capillary suspensions at diverse length scales: from single capillary bridges to bulk
• Connecting particle clustering and rheology in attractive particle networks
• Effect of geometry on the dewetting of granular chains by evaporation
• Modelling ternary fluids in contact with elastic membranes
• Effect of an interstitial fluid on the dynamics of three-dimensional granular media
• Dynamics of wetting explored with inkjet printing
• Wetting of an annular liquid in a capillary tube