The shape evolution of liquid droplets in miscible environments

• Published in: Journal of fluid mechanics Vol. 852; pp. 422 - 452
• Main Authors: Walls, Daniel J., Meiburg, Eckart, Fuller, Gerald G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 10.10.2018
• Subjects: Contact angle; Diffusion; Droplets; Equilibrium; Evolution; Experiments; Fluid mechanics; Gravity; JFM Papers; Liquids; Microscopy; Miscibility; Momentum; Numerical analysis; Shape; Spreading; Velocity distribution; Stokesian dynamics; drops; buoyant boundary layers
• ISSN: 0022-1120; 1469-7645
• DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2018.535

Miscible liquids often come into contact with one another in natural and technological situations, commonly as a drop of one liquid present in a second, miscible liquid. The shape of a liquid droplet present in a miscible environment evolves spontaneously in time, in a distinctly different fashion than drops present in immiscible environments, which have been reported previously. We consider drops of two classical types, pendant and sessile, in building upon our prior work with miscible systems. Here we present experimental findings of the shape evolution of pendant drops along with an expanded study of the spreading of sessile drops in miscible environments. We develop scalings considering the diffusion of mass to group volumetric data of the evolving pendant drops and the diffusion of momentum to group leading-edge radial data of the spreading sessile drops. These treatments are effective in obtaining single responses for the measurements of each type of droplet, where the volume of a pendant drop diminishes exponentially in time and the leading-edge radius of a sessile drop grows following a power law of $t^{1/2}$ at long times. A complementary numerical approach to compute the concentration and velocity fields of these systems using a simplified set of governing equations is paired with our experimental findings.