Towards a Model for Simulating Collision of Multiple Water Droplets Flow Down a Leaf Surface

Abstract

In the current article, a physics-based mathematical model is presented to generate realistic trajectories of water droplets across the Frangipani leaf surface and can be applied on any other kind of leaves, which is the first in the series of two articles that we are going to present the second article later on. In the second article, we will study the collision between the droplet and the liquid streak. The model has many applications in different scientific and engineering fields, such as modelling pesticide movements on leaves surfaces and modeling absorption and nutrition systems. The leaf surface consists of a triangular mesh structure that needs to be constructed using different techniques such as a well-known technique called EasyMesh method. The leaf surface is constructed using surface fitting techniques, such as finite elements methods and Clough-Tocher method, using a set of 3D real-world data points collected by a laser scanner, and the motion of the droplet on each triangle is calculated using a derived equation of motion. The motion of the droplet affected different forces, such as gravity and drag forces. Simulations of the model were verified using Matlab programming, and the results seemed to be real and capture the droplet motion very well.