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Non-wetting impact of a sphere onto a bath and its application to bouncing droplets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2017

Carlos A. Galeano-Rios
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
Paul A. Milewski*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
J.-M. Vanden-Broeck
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
*
Email address for correspondence: p.a.milewski@bath.ac.uk

Abstract

We present a fully predictive model for the impact of a smooth, convex and perfectly hydrophobic solid onto the free surface of an incompressible fluid bath of infinite depth in a regime where surface tension is important. During impact, we impose natural kinematic constraints along the portion of the fluid interface that is pressed by the solid. This provides a mechanism for the generation of linear surface waves and simultaneously yields the pressure applied on the impacting masses. The model compares remarkably well with data of the impact of spheres and bouncing droplet experiments, and is completely free of any of impact parametrisation.

Information

Type
Papers
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 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© 2017 Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Schematics of an axial section of the hydrophobic impact of a solid sphere onto a free fluid surface. The unpressed free surface is shown in the dashed light grey line, the pressed part of the fluid interface $S_{C}$ is shown in dark grey. The dashed line sits on the level of the undisturbed free surface ($z=0$), and its length corresponds to the diameter of $A_{C}$ (i.e. $2r_{c}$), the normal projection of the pressed spherical cap $S_{C}$ on the horizontal plane.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Typical tangency error behaviour. All images correspond to the same simulation at the same time and the axes are in units of ball radii: (a) a contact in which $r_{c}$ is too small; (b) the optimal radius $r_{c}$ for the given discretisation; and (c) $r_{c}$ being too large.

Figure 2

Figure 3. (a) Comparison of experimental results to our simulations of the same experiment. Markers ($+$) correspond to the tracking of the centre of the ball as reported in figure 4 of Lee & Kim (2008) ($R_{o}=0.96~\text{mm}$, $V_{0}=89~\text{cm}~\text{s}^{-1}$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}_{s}=1.32~\text{gr}~\text{cm}^{-3}$; i.e. $Re=955.7$, $Fr=84.2$, $We=10.71$, $M=5.5$), solid curves correspond to the results of our simulation. The black curve shows the vertical trajectory of the centre of the ball, the dark grey curve tracks the south pole of the ball and the light grey curve displays the elevation of the fluid free surface just underneath the same point. The grey curves coincide while in contact. (b) Vertical upward force on the ball (black) as predicted by the model. In grey we have the contribution to this force that is due to the pressure jump imposed by surface tension.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Cross-sections of the simulation and experimental results. The grey circle corresponds to the experimental tracking of the ball as reported in figure 4 of Lee & Kim (2008): (a) $tV_{0}/R_{o}=2$; (b) $tV_{0}/R_{o}=4$; (c) $tV_{0}/R_{o}=8$; (d) $tV_{0}/R_{o}=18$.

Figure 4

Figure 5. Cross-section of the bouncer’s impact ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}=3.25$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}=0.8$). The solid grey line corresponds to the free surface, the dashed line shows the undisturbed surface level. Axes are measured in millimetres.

Figure 5

Figure 6. Wave profiles during one forcing period (a), sampled evenly through time. The grey contour limits the region that is blown up in (b), showing the details of the forced part of the surface. In (b) the contact area is highlighted with a thicker grey line. Time increases in the vertical direction; $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}=0.8$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}=3.25$. The grey vertical bars on both panels are placed there for scaling, and their extent is of 0.1 mm.

Figure 6

Figure 7. Motion of the south pole of the drop (black) and the fluid point just underneath it (grey). Bouncing modes can be identified from the figures: (a) a $(1,1)$ mode, (b) a $(2,2)$, (c) a slightly different $(2,2)$ mode, (d) a $(2,1)^{1}$ mode, (e) a $(2,1)^{2}$ mode and (f) a chaotic mode.

Figure 7

Figure 8. Forces between the drop and the bath during two periods of forcing: (a) a $(1,1)$ mode, (b) a $(2,2)$ mode, (c) a $(2,1)^{1}$ mode and (d) a $(2,1)^{2}$ mode. Solid black lines correspond to the prediction of the forces as given by the present model. Grey dashed lines show the forces for the same regimes, as predicted by Milewski et al. (2015), grey solid lines trace the contribution of surface tension to the total force. We recall that $m$ is the mass of the droplet.

Figure 8

Figure 9. Evolution of the contact area ($A_{C}$) over two forcing periods. (ad) Correspond to the bouncing regimes depicted in figure 8 in the respective panels. We note that for this figure and figure 8 we used $\text{d}r\leqslant R_{o}/20$.

Figure 9

Figure 10. Regime diagram of bouncers. The background is colour coded according to the mode of bouncing observed in our simulations. The square bullets show experimentally observed bouncers, reported in Wind-Willansen et al. (2013). The colour coding of the squares is the same as that of the background, with the addition of white for the $(4,2)$ mode and pink for the $(4,3)$ mode, which were not found in this sweep of physical parameters with the simulations. The hashed area corresponds to modes that are to be strictly classified as $(2,2)$; however, the intermediate flight that separates the two contacts is rather subtle, and thus could be easily taken to be a $(2,1)^{1}$. Walkers were found experimentally to the right of the red curve.

Figure 10

Figure 11. Experimental phases of impact (grey shading) and take off (blue shading), compared with predictions by the model presented in this work (solid lines). The vertical axis measures the phase of the shaker, with the convention that maximum height of the bath is attained at $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}=0$. The vertical extent of the shadings corresponds to the 95 % confidence interval about the value reported in Damiano (2015). The dashed lines correspond to the predictions obtained using the (corrected) model presented in Milewski et al. (2015).

Figure 11

Figure 12. Comparison of the radial profiles of the experimental measurements (Damiano et al.2016) of wave topography (black) for a bouncer of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}=0.8$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}=3.25$, i.e. just below the walking threshold, to the predictions of the model presented here (grey) for the same shaking. The vicinity of the origin is not shown, since in this region, the presence of the drop interferes with the measurements.

Figure 12

Figure 13. Domain of integration in which we apply Green’s second identity.

Figure 13

Figure 14. (a) Schematics of the meshes used to approximate the singular integrals. The black lines correspond to the radial mesh, i.e. the level sets of function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ sampled at each discrete point $\text{i}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}r$. The grey lines correspond to a polar mesh used to estimate $N\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}(\text{i}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}r)$. The (♦) marker shows a generic point on the polar mesh. The values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ at the two thicker black lines, and possibly other neighbouring lines, are used to interpolate the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ at point (♦). (b) Enlarged view of (a). The grey dashed lines bound the region where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ is taken to be constant when approximating $N\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}(\text{i}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}r)$. This constant value is given by the interpolation of the values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ on lines of the radial mesh, shown above in thick black lines.

Figure 14

Figure 15. Decay of error in the evaluation of the $N$ operator. Here $Me$ and $M$ are the $L^{1}(\mathbb{R}^{2})$ norms of the error and the evaluation of the test function, respectively. The error is measured against the predictions of an spectral method with higher resolution. The black curve corresponds to the measured error, the grey dashed line to the linear regression. The slope of the linear fit is $m=-2.55$.