A conservation-consistent boundary condition for nonlinear models of soluble-surfactant-laden falling films
Analysis of PDEs
2026-05-20 v1 Fluid Dynamics
Abstract
A conservation-consistent boundary condition is proposed for nonlinear models of soluble-surfactant-laden falling films, ensuring exact conservation of total surfactant mass. The formulation resolves an inconsistency in widely used reduced models, Pascal et al. (PRF, 2019), D'Alessio et al. (JFM, 2020), which exhibit a gradual drift of mass during nonlinear evolution in a closed periodic domain. We show that this originates from an inconsistency in the surface transport reduction and derive a corrected boundary condition that removes this defect. As the discrepancy appears only at the nonlinear order, linear stability results remain unaffected, explaining why the issue has remained unnoticed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.19427,
title = {A conservation-consistent boundary condition for nonlinear models of soluble-surfactant-laden falling films},
author = {Sanghasri Mukhopadhyay and Séverine Millet and Bastien Di Pierro and Asim Mukhopadhyay},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.19427},
year = {2026}
}