Dynamic contact angle of spreading droplets: Experiments and simulations

This paper presents results of an experimental investigation of a single drop impact onto a dry, partially wettable substrate and its numerical simulation. Particularly, the drop spreading diameter and the dynamic contact angle are measured at different time instants after impact. Two surfaces, wax (low wettability) and glass (high wettability), are used to study the effect of surface wettability (static contact angle) on the impact dynamics. It is shown that existing empirical models for the dynamic contact angle (e.g., Hoffman-Voinov-Tanner law) do not predict well the change of the dynamic contact angle, especially at high capillary numbers. In addition to the experimental investigations, the drop impact was studied numerically, focusing primarily on the contact angle treatment. The singularity in the neighborhood of the moving contact line is removed from the computational domain and replaced by a local force with some dependence on the instantaneous advancing/receding contact-line velocity. The predicted time dependence of the drop spreading diameter and of the dynamic contact angle agrees well with the experimental data for both the advancing and receding phases of the impact process. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.