Hydrophobized metallic meshes can ease water droplet rolling

Abba Abdulhamid Abubakar, Bekir Sami Yilbas*, Hussain Al-Qahtani, Anwaruddin Siddiqui Mohammed

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Rolling liquid droplets are of great interest for various applications including self-cleaning of surfaces. Interfacial resistance, in terms of pinning and shear rate, has a critical role in droplet rolling dynamics on hydrophobic surfaces. Lowering the interfacial resistance requires reducing the droplet wetting length and droplet fluid contact area on hydrophobic surfaces. The present study examines droplet rolling behavior on inclined hydrophobized metallic meshes, which facilitate reduced wetting length and contact area of droplets. Experiments are carried out using a high-speed recording facility to evaluate droplet translational and rolling velocities over various sizes of hydrophobized meshes. The flow field inside the droplet fluid is simulated in 3-dimensional space mimicking the conditions of experiments. The findings reveal that droplet translational velocity attains significantly higher values for hydrophobized meshes than plain hydrophobized metallic surfaces. Increasing the mesh size enhances the droplet velocity and reduces the droplet kinetic energy dissipation created by interfacial surface tension and shear forces. Increasing the droplet volume enhances the droplet velocity despite the fact that pinning and frictional forces increase at the liquid-mesh interface. Hence, for rolling droplets on the mesh surface, the increase in the gravitational force component becomes larger than the increase in interfacial pinning and frictional forces.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7311-7321
Number of pages11
JournalSoft Matter
Volume17
Issue number31
DOIs
StatePublished - 21 Aug 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Royal Society of Chemistry 2021.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Chemistry
  • Condensed Matter Physics

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