Capillary Spreading of Liquid Drops on Solid Surfaces

Capillary Spreading of Liquid Drops on Prewetted Solid Surfaces

“…following steps similar to those used in (3,5,6), and requiring a similarity solution, we show that satisfies…”

“…Spreading is assumed to occur over a macroscopic preexisting flat liquid film, so that, dropping disjoining-pressure effects reduces the equation governing changes of the drop profile (3,5,6) to…”

“…Reviews can be found in Refs. (1)(2)(3)(4)(5) and in the literature cited therein. The specific case of spreading over a macroscopic film of the same liquid, and of uniform thickness h ϱ , is reviewed and treated by Kalinin and Starov (6).…”

“…In previous works (3,5) related to spreading over dry smooth solid surfaces, complete solutions were not provided, and instead, an asymptotic representation for the inner solution, similar in form to the one used in (6), was used as an approximation. The present work allows us to evaluate the accuracy of this approximation, at least for the case of spreading over a macroscopic flat liquid film.…”

Spreading of a wetting film under the action of van der Waals forces

“…͑5͒ leads to a finite value of y(h) at large h. We found the result to be very sensitive to the choice of an initial point and could not reliably confirm the numerical value of h 0 reported by Hervet and de Gennes. 8 Several authors [9][10][11] attempted to describe the macroscopic spreading process under the action of either gravity, or surface tension, or both, assuming a self-similar form of the solution in the macroscopic region, while accounting for the effect of disjoining pressure through matching with de Gennes' outer asymptotics. The matching could not be, however, exact, due to the incompatibility of asymptotics and the breakdown of self-similarity.…”