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Marangoni-driven patterns, ridges and hills in surfactant-covered parametric surface waves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2025

Debashis Panda
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK
Lyes Kahouadji
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK
Laurette S. Tuckerman
Affiliation:
Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes, CNRS, ESPCI Paris, Université PSL, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris, 75005 Paris, France
Seungwon Shin
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and System Design Engineering, Hongik University, Seoul 04066, Republic of Korea
Jalel Chergui
Affiliation:
Université Paris Saclay, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN), 91400 Orsay, France
Damir Juric
Affiliation:
Université Paris Saclay, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN), 91400 Orsay, France Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, UK
Omar K. Matar*
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK
*
Corresponding author: Omar K. Matar, o.matar@imperial.ac.uk

Abstract

Parametric oscillations of an interface separating two fluid phases create nonlinear surface waves, called Faraday waves, which organise into simple patterns, such as squares and hexagons, as well as complex structures, such as double hexagonal and superlattice patterns. In this work, we study the influence of surfactant-induced Marangoni stresses on the formation and transition of Faraday-wave patterns. We use a control parameter, $B$, that assesses the relative importance of Marangoni stresses as compared with the surface-wave dynamics. Our results show that the threshold acceleration required to destabilise a surfactant-covered interface through vibration increases with increasing $B$. For a surfactant-free interface, a square-wave pattern is observed. As $B$ is incremented, we report transitions from squares to asymmetric squares, weakly wavy stripes and ultimately to ridges and hills. These hills are a consequence of the bidirectional Marangoni stresses at the neck of the ridges. The mechanisms underlying the pattern transitions and the formation of exotic ridges and hills are discussed.

Information

Type
JFM Rapids
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. (a) Schematic representation of the computational domain: the height of the domain $\tilde H = 5.00\, \textrm {mm}$, and the lateral dimensions $\tilde {\lambda }_c \times \tilde {\lambda }_c$, where $\tilde {\lambda }_c$ is the critical wavelength. No-penetration and no-slip boundary conditions are applied at the bottom and top of the domain and periodic boundaries on the sides. Here, $\tilde F$ is the oscillatory driving acceleration, $\tilde A$ is the acceleration amplitude, and $\omega$ is the angular frequency. (b) Critical acceleration $F_c$ for a surfactant-free interface where the solid lines represent the neutral curves for the hydrodynamic parameters listed in Ubal et al. (2005b) and the present work, evaluated using the method of Kumar & Tuckerman (1994). Here ‘SH’ and ‘H’ refer to the subharmonic and harmonic tongues. (c,d) Temporal evolution of the total kinetic energy $E_k$ for a (c) surfactant-free and (d) surfactant-covered ($\beta _s = 1.0,\,\Gamma _0 = 0.2$) interface at different acceleration amplitudes $F$. The wavelength in both cases is the critical wavelength $\tilde {\lambda }_c = 5.3023\,\textrm {mm}$ for the surfactant-free case.

Figure 1

Table 1. Numerical threshold acceleration $F_c^N(B)$ for surfactant-free and surfactant-covered interfaces for varying initial surfactant coverage $\Gamma _0$ and elasticity number $\beta _s$ and a fixed wavelength $\lambda _c = 5.3023$. The surfactant-free critical acceleration $F_c = 12.34$ is obtained by using the linear stability method of Kumar & Tuckerman (1994). The table demonstrates the agreement of our thresholds with those of Ubal et al. (2005b) via $\delta ^{\textrm {Ubal}}(B) \equiv |F_c^N(B)-F_c^{\rm Ubal}(B)|/F_c^N(B)$. The last column presents the increase in the Faraday threshold due to surfactant coverage via $\Delta \equiv (F^N_c(B)-F_c)/F_c$.

Figure 2

Table 2. Numerical threshold acceleration $F_c^N$ for wavelength $\lambda _c$ and varying $\beta _s$, $\Gamma _0$ and $B$, and its relative increase $\Delta \equiv (F_c^N-F_c)/F_c$ from the surfactant-free case. The bold data are used in figure 2.

Figure 3

Figure 2. (a) Phase diagram in the $\beta _s{-}\Gamma _0$ parameter plane showing the inertia-dominated (violet) and Marangoni-dominated (pink) regions. The solid, dotted, dot-dashed and dashed lines correspond to the $B = 1, 1.23, 1.46, 2$ contours, respectively. The four typical patterns are squares, asymmetric squares, weakly wavy stripes, and ridges and hills. The phase boundaries are accurate to within $\Delta B = \pm 0.1$. The corresponding values of $B$ and $F_c^N$ are reported in table2. (b) Spatiotemporal evolution of the surface deflection $\zeta$ over one time period is shown from left to right; squares ($B = 0.92$), asymmetric squares ($B = 1.23$), weakly wavy stripes ($B = 1.51$), and ridges and hills ($B = 1.83$) are shown from top to bottom rows, respectively. Panels (c,d) show $\zeta _{mn}$ and $\Gamma _{mn}$, the maximal magnitudes over time of the $\zeta$ and $\Gamma$ fourier coefficients, respectively, as a function of $B$.

Figure 4

Figure 3. (ad) Three-dimensional visualisation of the surface. (a) Rise of ridges and necking process at $t = T/4$ and (b) maximum rise of the ridge at $t = 3T/8$. (c) Prominent hill on the ridge at $t = T/2$. (d) Falling hill at $t = 3T/4$. (e–h) Two-dimensional projections on $x{-}z$ slice containing interface curve $s$ (indicated in (a)) for $t = T/4, 3T/8, T/2$ and $3T/4$, respectively. A half-wavelength (ridge to trough) is shown. Colour-coding of the plane indicates $y-$vorticity $\omega _y$, while streamlines show flow in the $x{-}z$ plane. The interface curve $s$ is coloured according to the surfactant concentration. Red dots indicate the point of maximum curvature. (i–l) Tangential (see (f)) Marangoni stress and velocity along $s$ at $t = T/4, 3T/8, T/2$ and $3T/4$ shown as black and red curves, respectively. When the sign of one of these quantities is positive (negative), its direction points rightwards (leftwards) from the apex (trough) through the neck to the trough (apex) of the ridge, as indicated at the top (bottom) of figure 3(i). The vertical dashed line indicates the necking region, shown as the red dot in the corresponding $x{-}z$ projection. The length of $s$ decreases from approximately $5$ at $t=T/4, 3T/8,$$T/2$ to approximately $4$ at $t=3T/4$, as can be seen in the curves in (e–h).

Figure 5

Figure 4. Marangoni-influenced ridge formation: (a) $x{-}z$ projection containing $s$, as defined in figure 3, at $t = T$; the colour-coding used here is that of figure 3. (b) Three-dimensional visualisation of the interface colour-coded by the magnitude of Marangoni stresses $|\boldsymbol{\nabla} _s \sigma |$, indicating the barriers around the rising ridge.