Related papers: Stability and dewetting of thin liquid films
The stability of thin liquid films on a surface depends on the excess free energy of the system involving various short-range and long-range interactions. In an unstable condition, thin liquid films may dewet into multiple small-sized…
Stability of thin lubricating fluid coated slippery surfaces depends on the surface energy of the underlying solid surface. High energy solid surfaces, coated with thin lubricating oil, lead to the dewetting of the oil films upon depositing…
Liquid films of nanometric thickness are prone to spinodal dewetting driven by disjoining pressure, meaning that a non-wetting liquid film of homogeneous thickness in the range of tens of nanometers will spontaneously break into droplets.…
We consider two stacked ultra-thin layers of different liquids on a solid substrate. Using long-wave theory, we derive coupled evolution equations for the free liquid-liquid and liquid-gas interfaces. Linear and non-linear analyses show…
We study a model for a thin liquid film dewetting from a periodic heterogeneous substrate (template). The amplitude and periodicity of a striped template heterogeneity necessary to obtain a stable periodic stripe pattern, i.e. pinning, are…
The instability, dynamics and morphological transitions of patterns in thin liquid films on periodic striped surfaces (consisting of alternating less and more wettable stripes) are investigated based on 3-D nonlinear simulations that…
When a liquid film lies on a non-wettable substrate, the configuration is unstable and the film then retracts from a solid substrate to form droplets. This phenomenon, known as dewetting, commonly leads to undesirable morphological changes.…
We study dewetting of thin polymer films with built-in topographical fluctuations produced by rubbing the film surface with a rayon cloth. By varying the density of imposed surface defects, we unambiguously distinguish spinodal dewetting,…
The stability of nonvolatile thin liquid films and of sessile droplets is strongly affected by finite size effects. We analyze their stability within the framework of density functional theory using the sharp kink approximation, i.e., on…
Stability of thin liquid films on a surface can be controlled using an external stimuli, such as electric field, temperature or light by manipulating the total excess free energy of the system. It has been previously shown that thin…
The spontaneous formation of droplets via dewetting of a thin fluid film from a solid substrate allows for materials nanostructuring, under appropriate experimental control. While thermal fluctuations are expected to play a role in this…
A transient surface instability is reported in thin nematic films of 5CB and 8CB, occurring near the nematic-isotropic phase transition. Although this instability leads to patterns reminiscent of spinodal dewetting, we show that it is…
Switchable and adaptive substrates emerged as valuable tools for the control of wetting and actuation of droplet motion. Here we report a computational study of the dynamics of an unstable thin liquid film deposited on a switchable…
We consider the dynamic wetting and dewetting processes of films and droplets of complex liquids on planar surfaces, focusing on the case of colloidal suspensions, where the particle interactions can be sufficiently attractive to cause…
We have studied the breakup and subsequent fluid flow in very thin films of partially wetting liquid on solid substrates, using molecular dynamics simulations. The liquid is made of short chain molecules interacting with Lennard-Jones…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
Thin liquid films exhibit rich instability and rupture dynamics that critically impact coating performance across many applications. In this work, we use the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) simulations within a lubrication-theory framework…
A surface instability is reported in thin nematic films of 5CB and 8CB, occurring near the nematic--isotropic phase transition. Although this instability leads to patterns reminiscent of spinodal dewetting, we show that it is actually based…
Thin liquid films are ubiquitous in natural phenomena and technological applications. They have been extensively studied via deterministic hydrodynamic equations, but thermal fluctuations often play a crucial role that needs to be…
A thin film on a horizontal solid substrate and coated with a soluble surfactant is considered. The governing degenerate parabolic equations for the film height and the surfactant concentrations on the surface and in the bulk are derived…