Fluorescent visualization of a spreading surfactant

The spreading of surfactants on thin films is an industrially and medically important phenomenon, but the dynamics are highly nonlinear and visualization of the surfactant dynamics has been a long-standing experimental challenge. We perform the first quantitative, spatiotemporally resolved measurements of the spreading of an insoluble surfactant on a thin fluid layer. During the spreading process, we directly observe both the radial height profile of the spreading droplet and the spatial distribution of the fluorescently tagged surfactant. We find that the leading edge of a spreading circular layer of surfactant forms a Marangoni ridge in the underlying fluid, with a trough trailing the ridge as expected. However, several novel features are observed using the fluorescence technique, including a peak in the surfactant concentration that trails the leading edge, and a flat, monolayer-scale spreading film that differs from concentration profiles predicted by current models. Both the Marangoni ridge and the surfactant leading edge can be described to spread as R proportional to t(delta). We find spreading exponents delta(H) approximate to 0.30 and delta(Gamma) approximate to 0.22 for the ridge peak and surfactant leading edge, respectively, which are in good agreement with theoretical predictions of delta = 1/4. In addition, we observe that the surfactant leading edge initially leads the peak of the Marangoni ridge, with the peak later catching up to the leading edge.