The influence of inertia and contact angle on the instability of partially wetting liquid strips: A numerical analysis study

The stability of a thread of fluid deposited on a flat solid substrate is studied numerically by means of the Finite Element Method in combination with an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian technique. A good agreement is observed when our results are compared with predictions of linear stability analysis obtained by other authors. Moreover, we also analysed the influence of inertia for different contact angles and found that inertia strongly affects the growth rate of the instability when contact angles are large. By contrast, the wave number of the fastest growing mode does not show important variations with inertia. The numerical technique allows us to follow the evolution of the free surface instability until comparatively late stages, where the filament begins to break into droplets. The rupture pattern observed for several cases shows that the number of principal droplets agrees reasonably well with an estimation based on the fastest growing modes. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.