Sessile Drop on Oscillating Incline

Abstract

Natural or industrial flows of a fluid often involve droplets or bubbles of another fluid, pinned by physical or chemical impurities or by the roughness of the bounding walls. Here we study numerically one drop pinned on a circular hydrophilic patch, on an oscillating incline whose angle is proportional to sin(ωt). The resulting deformation of the drop is measured by the displacement of its center of mass, which behaves similarly to a driven over-damped linear oscillator with amplitude A(ω) and phase lag φ(ω). The phase lag is O(ω) at small ω like a linear oscillator, but the amplitude is O(ω−1) in a wide range of large ω instead of O(ω−2) for a linear oscillator. A heuristic explanation is given for this behaviour. The simulations were performed with the software Comsol in mode Laminar Two-Phase Flow, Level Set, with fluid 1 as engine oil and fluid 2 as water.

Keywords

• Droplet; Pinning; Two-Phase flow; Driven oscillator; Finite elements; Computational study.