Coalescence of elastic blisters filled with a viscous fluid
Fluid Dynamics
2024-02-15 v1
Abstract
Pockets of viscous fluid coalescing beneath an elastic plate are encountered in a wide range of natural phenomena and engineering processes, spanning across scales. As the pockets merge, a bridge is formed with a height increasing as the plate relaxes. We study the spatiotemporal dynamics of such an elasto-hydrodynamic coalescence process by combining experiments, lubrication theory and numerical simulations. The bridge height exhibits an exponential growth with time, which corresponds to a self-similar solution of the bending-driven thin-film equation. We address this unique self-similarity and the self-similar shape of the bridge, both of which are corroborated in numerical simulations and experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.01774,
title = {Coalescence of elastic blisters filled with a viscous fluid},
author = {Torstein Sæter and Christian Pedersen and Jacco H. Snoeijer and Thomas Salez and Andreas Carlson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.01774},
year = {2024}
}