Surfactant-laden liquid thread breakup driven by thermal fluctuations

Abstract

The breakup of liquid threads into droplets is crucial in various applications, such as nanoprinting, nanomanufacturing, and inkjet printing, where a detailed understanding of the thinning neck dynamics allows for a precise droplet control. Here, the role of surfactant in the breakup process is studied by many-body dissipative particle dynamics, in particular, the various regime transitions and thread profiles, shedding light on molecular-level intricacies of this process hitherto inaccessible to continuum theory and experiments. Moreover, the role of surfactant in the most unstable perturbation, the formed droplet size, and surfactant distributions have been unraveled. As surfactant concentration rises, both the wavelength and time to breakup steadily increase due to the lowering of surface tension below the critical micelle concentration (CMC) and viscous effects introduced by micelles above the CMC. These changes prior to the breakup lead to larger droplets being formed in cases with higher surfactant concentration. We also compared the thinning dynamics to existing theoretical predictions, revealing that the surfactant-laden breakup starts at the inertial regime and transitions into the thermal fluctuation regime when the concentration is increased. Thus, we illuminate the hitherto poorly investigated and intricate breakup process of surfactant-laden liquid threads driven by thermal fluctuations, contributing to a deeper understanding of this process at molecular scales.

arXiv comment10 figures, 24 pages

References in corpus (8)

• Vapour-liquid coexistence in many-body dissipative particle dynamics
• Dissipative particle dynamics for interacting systems
• Dynamics of nanojets
• No-go theorem in many body dissipative particle dynamics
• Liquid phase parametrisation and solidification in many-body dissipative particle dynamics
• Universal Thinning of Liquid Filaments under Dominant Surface Forces
• Liquid Thread Breakup and the Formation of Satellite Droplets
• Definitions of local density in density-dependent potentials for mixtures

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Many-Body Dissipative Particle Dynamics with the MARTINI "Lego" approach
• Collision of surfactant-laden droplets: insights from molecular dynamics simulation
• Coarse-Grained Model of the Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate Anionic Surfactant Based on the MDPD--Martini Force Field
• Phase Transitions of Oscillating Droplets on Horizontally Vibrating Substrates
• Molecular Dynamics Study of Rayleigh-Plateau Instability at Liquid-Liquid Interfaces