LIFD Colloquium - Droplet Dynamics, James Sprittles
- Date
- Wednesday 6 October 2021, 14:00
- Location
- Zoom
- Category
- LIFD Colloquia
About this event
Speaker: Professor James Sprittles, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Title: Droplet dynamics in the presence of gas nanofilms: merging, wetting, bouncing & levitation
Bio: James Sprittles is a Professor in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick who is interested in the computational modelling of small scale flows. His recent fundamental research has focussed on the influence of gas kinetic effects and thermal fluctuations on droplet dynamics, with more applied interests in multimaterial 3D printing and thermal management.
Abstract: Recent advances in experimental techniques have enabled remarkable discoveries and insight into how the dynamics of thin gas/vapour films can profoundly influence the behaviour of liquid droplets: drops impacting solids can “skate on a film of air” [1], so that they can “bounce off walls” [2,3]; reductions in ambient gas pressure can suppress splashing [4] and initiate the merging of colliding droplets [5]; and evaporating droplets can levitate on their own vapour film [7] (the Leidenfrost effect). Despite these advances, the precise physical mechanisms governing these phenomena remains a topic of debate. A theoretical approach would shed light on these issues, but due to the strongly multiscale nature of these processes, brute force computation is infeasible. Furthermore, when films reach the scale of the mean free path in the gas (i.e. ~100nm) and below, new nanoscale physics appears that renders the classical Navier-Stokes paradigm inaccurate.
In this talk, I will overview our development of efficient computational models for the aforementioned droplet dynamics in the presence of gas nanofilms into which gas-kinetic, van der Waals and/or evaporative effects can be easily incorporated [8,9]. It will be shown that these models can reproduce experimental observations – for example, the threshold between bouncing and wetting for drop impact on a solid is reproduced to within 5%, whilst a model excluding either gas-kinetic or van der Waals effects is ~170% off! These models will then be exploited to make new experimentally-verifiable predictions, such as how we expect drops to behave in reduced pressure environments. Finally, I will conclude with some exciting directions for future work.
Figure 1. Drop bouncing off solid [2], drop-drop collisions [6] and splashing [4]
[1] JM Kolinski et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108 (2012), 074503. [2] JM Kolinski et al, EPL. 108 (2014), 24001. [3] J de Ruiter et al, Nature Phys. 11 (2014), 48. [4] L Xu et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 (2005), 184505. [5] J Qian & CK Law, J. Fluid. Mech. 331 (1997), 59. [6] KL Pan J. Appl. Phys. 103 (2008), 064901. [7] D Quéré, Ann. Rev. Fluid Mech. 45 (2013), 197. [8] JE Sprittles, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 (2017), 114502. [9] MV Chubynsky et al, Phys. Rev. Lett.. 124 (2020), 084501.