Relaxation of nonspherical sessile drops towards equilibrium

Abstract

We present a theoretical study related to a recent experiment on the coalescence of sessile drops. The study deals with the kinetics of relaxation towards equilibrium, under the action of surface tension, of a spheroidal drop on a flat surface. For such a nonspherical drop under partial wetting conditions, the dynamic contact angle varies along the contact line. We propose a new nonlocal approach to the wetting dynamics, where the contact line velocity depends on the geometry of the whole drop. We compare our results to those of the conventional approach in which the contact line velocity depends only on the local value of the dynamic contact angle. The influence on drop dynamics of the pinning of the contact line by surface defects is also discussed.

Physical Review E : Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, American Physical Society, 2002

References in corpus (1)

• Coalescence of sessile drops

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Equation of motion of the triple contact line along an inhomogeneous surface
• Dynamics and depinning of the triple contact line in the presence of periodic surface defects
• Quasi-static relaxation of arbitrarily shaped sessile drops
• Modelling of the moving deformed triple contact line: influence of the fluid inertia