Dewetting of a Heated Surface by an Evaporating Liquid Film under Conjoining/Disjoining Pressures

Thin film dynamics: theory and applications

“…The competition of attractive van der Waals forces and short range repulsive forces, like Born repulsion, can produce complex instabilities in layers of thin liquid films on solid substrates. Experimental studies have shown this behavior for polymer films [66,81,87,88,101], liquid crystal films [58,93,94], liquid metals [29,58] and evaporating films [41,76]. During these dewetting processes, large droplets are formed which are connected by ultra-thin films.…”

“…During these dewetting processes, large droplets are formed which are connected by ultra-thin films. In analogy to spinodal decomposition in phase separation for binary alloys described by the Cahn-Hilliard equation, this evolution is sometimes called spinodal dewetting [72,73,76].…”

“…The h −n term describes the aforementioned long-range attractive force, while the second term in (76) models the short range stabilizing effect of Born repulsion. Oron et al [76,77] consider (76) with (n, m) = (3, 4) to describe a thin film on a layered solid substrate. Our results show that the solutions of these models have the same qualitative structure for a large set of (n, m) values.…”

“…and assume that 0 < n < m, m ≥ 3 in (76). Then a unique positive smooth solution of (73)(74)(75)(76) exists for all t > 0.…”

“…Let Ω be a bounded domain of class C 0,1 , leth > 0 and assume 0 < n < m in (76). Then a global minimizer of E(·) (79) exists in the class V := {h ∈ H 1 (Ω) : Ω h dx = h}.…”