Lubrication theory for unstable thin liquid films on solid substrates is used to model the coarsening dynamics in the long-time behavior of dewetting films. The dominant physical effects that drive the fluid dynamics in dewetting films are surface tension and intermolecular interactions with the solid substrate. Instabilities in these films lead to rupture and other morphological changes that promote nonuniformity in the films. Following the initial instabilities, the films break up into near-equilibrium droplets connected by an ultrathin film. For longer times, the fluid will undergo a coarsening process in which droplets both move and exchange mass on slow time scales. The dynamics of this coarsening process will be obtained through the asymptotic reduction of the long-wave PDE governing the thin film to a set of ODEs for the evolution of the droplets. From this, a scaling law that governs the coarsening rate is derived.

A set of lubrication models for the thin film flow of incompressible fluids on solid substrates is derived and studied. The models are obtained as asymptotic limits of the Navier-Stokes equations with the Navier-slip boundary condition for different orders of magnitude for the slip-length parameter. Specifically, the influence of slip on the dewetting behavior of fluids on hydrophobic substrates is investigated here. Matched asymptotics are used to describe the dynamic profiles for dewetting films and comparison is given with computational simulations. The motion of the dewetting front shows transitions from being nearly linear in time for no-slip to t 2/3 as the slip is increased. For much larger slip lengths the front motion appears to become linear again. Correspondingly, the dewetting profiles undergo a transition from oscillatory to monotone decay into the uniform film layer for large slip. Increasing the slip further, to very large values, is associated with an increasing degree of asymmetry in the structure of the dewetting ridge profile.

Under the influence of long-range attractive and short-range repulsive forces, thin liquid films rupture and form complex dewetting patterns. This paper studies this phenomenon in one space dimension within the framework of fourth-order degenerate parabolic equations of lubrication type. We derive the global structure of the bifurcation diagram for steady-state solutions. A stability analysis of the solution branches and numerical simulations suggest coarsening occurs. Furthermore, we study the behaviour of solutions in the limit that shortrange repulsive forces are neglected. Both asymptotic analysis and numerical experiments show that this limit can concentrate mass in δ-distributions. Mathematics Subject Classification: 34B15, 35G25, 35K55, 35Q35

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We compare the flow behavior of liquid polymer films on silicon wafers coated with either octadecyl-(OTS) or dodecyltrichlorosilane (DTS). Our experiments show that dewetting on DTS is significantly faster than on OTS. We argue that this is tied to the difference in the solid/liquid friction. As the film dewets, the profile of the rim advancing into the undisturbed film is monotonically decaying on DTS but has an oscillatory structure on OTS. For the first time we can describe this transition in terms of a lubrication model with a Navier-slip condition for the flow of a viscous Newtonian liquid.