Simulating surfactant spreading: influence of a physically motivated equation of state

DOI10.1017/S095679251700002XMaRDI QIDQ4575273zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Dina Sinclair, Rachel Levy, Karen E. Daniels

Publication date 13 July 2018

Published in European Journal of Applied Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05261

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

PDEs in connection with fluid mechanics (35Q35) Thin fluid films (76A20) Capillarity (surface tension) for incompressible inviscid fluids (76B45) Capillarity (surface tension) for incompressible viscous fluids (76D45) Finite volume methods applied to problems in fluid mechanics (76M12)

Abstract: For more than two decades, a single model for the spreading of a surfactant-driven thin liquid film has dominated the applied mathematics literature on the subject. Recently, through the use of fluorescently-tagged lipids, it has become possible to make direct, quantitative comparisons between experiments and models. These comparisons have revealed two important discrepancies between simulations and experiments: the spatial distribution of the surfactant layer, and the timescale over which spreading occurs. In this paper, we present numerical simulations that demonstrate the impact of the particular choice of the equation of state (EoS) relating the surfactant concentration to the surface tension. Previous choices of the model EoS have been an ad-hoc decreasing function. Here, we instead propose an empirically-motivated equation of state; this provides a route to resolving some discrepancies and raises new issues to be pursued in future experiments. In addition, we test the influence of the choice of initial conditions and values for the non-dimensional groups. We demonstrate that the choice of EoS improves the agreement in surfactant distribution morphology between simulations and experiments, and impacts the dynamics of the simulations. The relevant feature of the EoS, the gradient, has distinct regions for empirically motivated choices, which suggests that future work will need to consider more than one timescale. We observe that the non-dimensional number controlling the relative importance of gravitational vs. capillary forces has a larger impact on the dynamics than the other non-dimensional groups. Finally, we observe that the experimental approach of using a ring to contain the surfactant could affect the surfactant and fluid dynamics if it disrupts the intended initial surfactant distribution. However, the meniscus itself does not significantly affect the dynamics.

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Cited in

(6)

• Unraveling surfactant transport on a thin liquid film
• Invariant solutions of surfactant-driven flows
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1728302 (Why is no real title available?)
• Simulation of spreading surfactant on a thin liquid film
• Capillary waves with surface viscosity
• An immersed boundary method for simulating interfacial flows with insoluble surfactant in three dimensions

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