Air Entrainment by Viscous Contact Lines
Fluid Dynamics
2011-10-25 v1
Abstract
The entrainment of air by advancing contact lines is studied by plunging a solid plate into a very viscous liquid. Above a threshold velocity, we observe the formation of an extended air film, typically 10 microns thick, which subsequently decays into air bubbles. Exploring a large range of viscous liquids, we find an unexpectedly weak dependence of entrainment speed on liquid viscosity, pointing towards a crucial role of the flow inside the air film. This induces a striking asymmetry between wetting and dewetting: while the breakup of the air film strongly resembles the dewetting of a liquid film, the wetting speeds are larger by orders of magnitude.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1110.5274,
title = {Air Entrainment by Viscous Contact Lines},
author = {Antonin Marchand and Tak Shing Chan and Jacco H. Snoeijer and Bruno Andreotti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.5274},
year = {2011}
}