The rapid, repeated, precise creation and deposition of droplets, printing or patterning of small features (say l = 10-3-1 mm), and the formation of thin films with controlled, uniform thickness by spraying, are of great importance to a variety of old and new industrial applications (1-5). The liquid transfer and drop formation/deposition processes involve complex free-surface flows and formation of columnar necks that undergo spontaneous capillary-driven instability, thinning and pinch-off (1-5). Despite the progress made using experimental, theoretical and one-dimensional simulation studies for analyzing drop formation and liquid transfer for simple Newtonian and inelastic fluids, mechanistic understanding of printing and spraying remains a challenge. The primary motivation for the present computation effort is to examine the possibility of using the volume-of-fluid (VOF) approach embedded in the FLOW-3D to obtain mechanistic understanding of pinch-off dynamics of Newtonian fluids. We show that our computational analysis captures the complex interplay of capillary, inertial and viscous stresses that determines the self-similar capillary thinning and pinch-off dynamics. For the drop formation and detachment of Newtonian fluids, we show that the self-similar neck evolution obtained from the computational analysis can be described using the universal scaling laws expected from theory and 1D simulations (1-7) as well as experiments (1, 2, 8-12). Our success in simulating such prototypical flows is a necessary step towards using FLOW-3D for careful computational analysis of the nonlinear dynamics underlying finite-time singularity, satellite drop formation as well as printability in more complex geometries, that are significantly harder to describe or study using 1D models and experiments.
Courtesy of University of Illinois at Chicago
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