Liquid meniscus friction on a wet plate: Bubbles, lamellae, and foams

Many microfluidics devices, coating processes, or diphasic flows involve the motion of a liquid meniscus on a wet wall. This motion induces a specific viscous force, that exhibits a nonlinear dependency in the meniscus velocity. We propose a review of the theoretical and experimental work made on this viscous force, for simple interfacial properties. The interface is indeed assumed either perfectly compressible (mobile interface) or perfectly incompressible (rigid interface). We show that, in the second case, the viscous force exerted by the wall on the meniscus is a combination of two power laws, scaling such as Ca-1/3 and Ca-2/3, with Ca the capillary number. We provide a prediction for the stress exerted on a foam sliding on a wet solid and compare it with experimental data, for the incompressible case. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4793544]