Unsteady fragmentation of a fluid bulk into droplets is important for epidemiology as it governs the transport of pathogens from sneezes and coughs, or from contaminated crops in agriculture. It is also ubiquitous in industrial processes such as paint, coating, and combustion. Unsteady fragmentation is distinct from steady fragmentation on which most theoretical efforts have been focused thus far. We address this gap by studying a canonical unsteady fragmentation process: the breakup from a drop impact on a finite surface where the drop fluid is transferred to a free expanding sheet of time-varying properties and bounded by a rim of time-varying thickness. The continuous rim destabilization selects the final spray droplets, yet this process remains poorly understood. We combine theory with advanced image analysis to study the unsteady rim destabilization. We show that, at all times, the rim thickness is governed by a local instantaneous Bond number equal to unity, defined with the instantaneous, local, unsteady rim acceleration. This criterion is found to be robust and universal for a family of unsteady inviscid fluid sheet fragmentation phenomena, from impacts of drops on various surface geometries to impacts on films. We discuss under which viscous and viscoelastic conditions the criterion continues to govern the unsteady rim thickness.

Understanding what shapes the drop size distributions produced from fluid fragmentation is important for a range of industrial, natural and health processes. Gilet & Bourouiba (J. R. Soc. Interface, vol. 12, 2015, 20141092) showed that both the size and speed of fragmented droplets are critical to transmission of pathogens in the agricultural context. In this paper, we study both the size and speed distributions of droplets ejected during a canonical unsteady sheet fragmentation from drop impact on a target of comparable size to that of the drop. Upon impact, the drop transforms into a sheet which expands in the air bounded by a rim on which ligaments grow, continuously shedding droplets. We developed high-precision tracking algorithms that capture all ejected droplets, measuring their size and speed, as well as the detachment time from, and link to, their ligament of origin. Both size and speed distributions of all ejected droplets are skewed. We show that the polydispersity and skewness of the distributions are inherently due to the unsteadiness of the sheet expansion. We show that each ligament sheds a single drop at a time throughout the entire sheet expansion by a mechanism of end-pinching. The droplet-to-ligament size ratio R ≈ 1.5 remains constant throughout the unsteady fragmentation, and is robust to change in impact Weber number. We also show that the population mean speed of the fragmented droplets at a given time is equal to the population mean speed of ligaments one necking time prior to detachment time.

We consider the radially expanding sheet formed upon impact of a drop on a surface of comparable size to that of the drop. A unified self-similar solution for the unsteady radial thickness profile of the expanding sheet is derived from first principles in the inviscid limit. This unified functional form reconciles two conflicting theoretical profiles of sheet thickness proposed in the literature and allows for the collapse on a single curve direct measurements of sheet thickness profiles reported in the literature and the detailed measurements conducted herein. We show good agreement between our proposed unified thickness profile and data from our experiments for a range of surface-to-drop size ratios. We show that there is an optimal range of surface-to-drop size ratio for which the hypothesis of inviscid thin sheet expansion in the air holds. Outside of this optimal range, either insufficient vertical momentum is transferred to horizontal momentum to form an expanding sheet or viscous effects become too important to neglect. In this latter regime, the dominant effect of surface friction is to modify the velocity profile. We elucidate this effect using a Blasius-type boundary layer model. Finally, we relate the geometry of the drop in its early phase of impact to the sheet thickness profile in the air. We show that the coefficients of the proposed unified similarity thickness profile can directly be linked to volume flux conservation at early times, and to the maximum sheet thickness at the edge of the surface. Our results thus quantitatively link the fluid history on the surface to the thickness and velocity profiles of the freely expanding sheet in the air.

Abstract

Upon impact on a solid surface, a drop expands into a sheet, a corona, which can rebound, stick or splash and fragment into secondary droplets. Previously, focus has been placed on impacts of single drops on surfaces to understand their splash, rebound or spreading. This is important for spraying, printing, and environmental and health processes such as contamination by pathogen-bearing droplets. However, sessile drops are ubiquitous on most surfaces and their interaction with the impacting drop is largely unknown. We report on the regimes of interactions between an impacting drop and a sessile drop. Combining experiments and theory, we derive the existence conditions for the four regimes of drop–drop interaction identified, and report that a subtle combination of geometry and momentum transfer determines a critical impact force governing their physics. Crescent-moon fragmentation is most efficient at producing and projecting secondary droplets, even when the impacting drop Weber number would not allow for splash to occur on the surface considered if the drop were isolated. We introduce a critical horizontal impact Weber number $We_{c}$ that governs the formation of a sheet from the sessile drop upon collision with the expanding corona of the impacting drop. We also predict and validate important properties of the crescent-moon fragmentation: the extension of its sheet base and the ligaments surrounding its base. Finally, our results suggest a new paradigm: impacts on most surfaces can make a splash of a new kind – a crescent-moon – for any impact velocity when neighbouring sessile drops are present.