Related papers: Dewetting of Thin Viscoelastic Polymer Films on Sl…
The dewetting dynamics of ultrathin polymer films, e.g. in the model system of polystyrene on a polydimethylsiloxane-covered substrate, exhibits interesting behavior like a fast decay of the dewetting velocity and a maximum in the width of…
Ultrathin polymer films that are produced e.g. by spin-coating are believed to be stressed since polymers are 'frozen in' into out-of-equilibrium configurations during this process. In the framework of a viscoelastic thin film model, we…
The study of the dewetting of very thin polymer films has recently revealed many unexpected features (e.g. unusual rim morphologies and front velocities) which have been the focus of several theoretical models. Surprisingly, the most…
Dewetting of ultra-thin polymer films near the glass transition exhibits unexpected front morphologies [G. Reiter, Phys. Rev. Lett., 87, 186101 (2001)]. We present here the first theoretical attempt to understand these features, focusing on…
Ultrathin polymer films on non-wettable substrates display dynamic features which have been attributed to either viscoelastic or slip effects. Here we show that in the weak and strong slip regime effects of viscoelastic relaxation are…
Slippage of Newtonian liquids in the presence of a solid substrate is a newly found phenomenon the origin of which is still under debate. In this paper, we present a new analysis method to extract the slip length. Enhancing the slip of…
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…
The dewetting dynamics of an ultrathin film is studied in the presence of evaporation - or reaction - of adatoms on the substrate. KMC simulations are in good agreement with an analytical model with diffusion, rim facetting, and substrate…
In this paper we present a theoretical model for the dewetting of ultra-thin polymer films. Assumming that the shear-thinning properties of these films can be described by a Cross-type constitutive equation, we analyze the front morphology…
Dewetting of ultrathin (< 100 nm) polymer films, by heating above the glass transition, produces droplets of sizes of the order of microns and mean separations between droplets of the order of tens of microns. These relatively large length…
Probing the fluid dynamics of thin films is an excellent tool to study the solid/liquid boundary condition. There is no need for external stimulation or pumping of the liquid due to the fact that the dewetting process, an internal…
Hydrodynamic slip of Newtonian liquids is a new phenomenon, the origin of which is not yet clarified. There are various direct and indirect techniques to measure slippage. Here we describe a method to characterize the influence of slippage…
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…
In this study, we present a novel method to assess the slip length and the viscosity of thin films of highly viscous Newtonian liquids. We quantitatively analyse dewetting fronts of low molecular weight polystyrene melts on Octadecyl- (OTS)…
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…
An experimental investigation is reported on the effect of shear on the bursting of molten ultra-thin polymer films embedded in an immiscible matrix. By using an optical microscope coupled with a shearing hotstage, the dewetting dynamics,…
The fluid dynamics of the classical dewetting instability in ultrathin films is a non-linear process. However, the physical manifestation of the instability in terms of characteristic length and time scales can be described by a linearized…
We study the deformation and dewetting of liquid films under impinging gas jets using experimental, analytical and numerical techniques. We first derive a reduced-order model (a thin-film equation) based on the long-wave assumption and on…
We study numerically the effect of thermal fluctuations and of variable fluid-substrate interactions on the spontaneous dewetting of thin liquid films. To this aim, we use a recently developed lattice Boltzmann method for thin liquid film…