Contact line instability and pattern selection in thermally driven liquid films

DOI10.1063/1.1566958zbMATH Open1186.76208arXivnlin/0207024OpenAlexW2091293465MaRDI QIDQ3556464FDOQ3556464

Authors: Roman O. Grigoriev 

Publication date: 22 April 2010

Published in: Physics of Fluids (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Liquids spreading over a solid substrate under the action of various forces are known to exhibit a long wavelength contact line instability. We use an example of thermally driven spreading on a horizontal surface to study how the stability of the flow can be altered, or patterns selected, using feedback control. We show that thermal perturbations of certain spatial structure imposed behind the contact line and proportional to the deviation of the contact line from its mean position can completely suppress the instability. Due to the presence of mean flow and a spatially nonuniform nature of spreading liquid films the dynamics of disturbances is governed by a nonnormal evolution operator, opening up a possibility of transient amplification and nonlinear instabilities. We show that in the case of thermal driving the nonnormality can be significant, especially for small wavenumber disturbances, and trace the origin of transient amplification to a close alignment of a large group of eigenfunctions of the evolution operator. However, for values of noise likely to occur in experiments we find that the transient amplification is not sufficiently strong to either change the predictions of the linear stability analysis or invalidate the proposed control approach.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/nlin/0207024

zbMATH Keywords

feedbackpattern formationslip flowflow controleigenvalues and eigenfunctionsflow instabilitywettingfilm flowliquid filmssubstrates

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Fluid mechanics (76-XX)

Cited In (9)

• On nontrivial traveling waves in thin film flows including contact lines
• Dynamics of solitary waves generated by subcritical instability under the action of delayed feedback control
• Global feedback control of a long-wave morphological instability
• Transient growth in driven contact lines
• Comparison of two dynamic contact line models for driven thin liquid films
• Transient dynamics and structure of optimal excitations in thermocapillary spreading: Precursor film model
• Dynamics of a spreading thin film with gravitational counterflow using slip model
• Control of the structuring of thin soft matter films by means of different types of external disturbance
• Instabilities in the flow of thin films on heterogeneous surfaces

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