No abstract

We investigate the stability of a thin Newtonian fluid spreading on a horizontal cylinder under the action of gravity. The capillary ridge forming at the advancing front is known to be unstable with respect to spanwise perturbations, resulting in the formation of fingers. In contrast to the classic case of a flow over an inclined plane, the gravity components along a cylindrical substrate vary in space and the draining flow is time-dependent, making a modal stability analysis inappropriate. A linear optimal transient growth analysis is instead performed to find the optimal spanwise wavenumber. We not only consider the optimal perturbations of the initial film thickness, as commonly done in the literature, but also the optimal topographical perturbations of the substrate, which are of significant practical relevance. We found that, in both cases, the optimal gains are obtained when the perturbation structures are the least affected by the time horizon. The optimal spanwise wavenumber is found to be dependent on the front location, due to the dependence of the characteristic length of the capillary ridge on its polar location.

We study statistical properties after a sudden episode of wind for water waves propagating in one direction. A wave with random initial conditions is propagated using a forced-damped higher order Nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS). During the wind episode, the wave action increases, the spectrum broadens, the spectral mean shifts up and the Benjamin-Feir index (BFI) and the kurtosis increase. Conversely, after the wind episode, the opposite occurs for each quantity. The kurtosis of the wave height distribution is considered the main parameter that can indicate whether rogue waves are likely to occur in a sea state, and the BFI is often mentioned as a means to predict the kurtosis. However, we find that while there is indeed a quadratic relation between these two, this relationship is dependent on the details of the forcing and damping. Instead, a simple and robust quadratic relation does exist between the kurtosis and the bandwidth. This could allow for a single-spectrum assessment of the likelihood of rogue waves in a given sea state. In addition, as the kurtosis depends strongly on the damping and forcing coefficients, by combining the bandwidth measurement with the damping coefficient, the evolution of the kurtosis after the wind episode can be predicted. * maura.brunetti@unige.ch

Droplet breakup is an important phenomenon in the field of microfluidics to generate daughter droplets. In this work, a novel breakup regime in the widely studied T-junction geometry is reported, where the pinch-off occurs laterally in the two outlet channels, leading to the formation of three daughter droplets, rather than at the center of the junction for conventional T-junctions which leads to two daughter droplets. It is demonstrated that this new mechanism is driven by surface tension, and a design rule for the T-junction geometry is proposed. A model for low values of the capillary number Ca is developed to predict the formation and growth of an underlying carrier fluid pocket that accounts for this lateral breakup mechanism. At higher values of Ca, the conventional regime of central breakup becomes dominant again. The competition between the new and the conventional regime is explored. Altogether, this novel droplet formation method at T-junction provides the functionality of alternating droplet size and composition, which can be important for the design of new microfluidic tools.

We propose a theoretical approach to derive amplitude equations governing the weakly nonlinear evolution of non-normal dynamical systems, when they experience transient growth or respond to harmonic forcing. This approach reconciles the non-modal nature of these growth mechanisms and the need for a centre manifold to project the leading-order dynamics. Under the hypothesis of strong non-normality, we take advantage of the fact that small operator perturbations suffice to make the inverse resolvent and the inverse propagator singular, which we encompass in a multiple-scale asymptotic expansion. The methodology is outlined for a generic nonlinear dynamical system, and four application cases highlight common non-normal mechanisms in hydrodynamics: the streamwise convective non-normal amplification in the flow past a backward-facing step, and the Orr and lift-up mechanisms in the plane Poiseuille flow.