Droplet impact on doubly re-entrant structures

Navdeep Sangeet Singh, Thanaphun Jitniyom, Miguel Navarro-Cía, Nan Gao*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

Doubly re-entrant pillars have been demonstrated to possess superior static and dynamic liquid repellency against highly wettable liquids compared to straight or re-entrant pillars. Nevertheless, there has been little insight into how the key structural parameters of doubly re-entrant pillars influence the hydrodynamics of impacting droplets. In this work, we carried out numerical simulations and experimental studies to portray the fundamental physical phenomena that can explain the alteration of the surface wettability from adjusting the design parameters of the doubly re-entrant pillars. On the one hand, three-dimensional multiphase flow simulations of droplet impact were conducted to probe the predominance of the overhang structure in dynamic liquid repellency. On the other hand, the numerical results of droplet impact behaviours are agreed by the experimental results for different pitch sizes and contact angles. Furthermore, the dimensions of the doubly re-entrant pillars, including the height, diameter, overhang length and overhang thickness, were altered to establish their effect on droplet repellency. These findings present the opportunity for manipulations of droplet behaviours by means of improving the critical dimensional parameters of doubly re-entrant structures.
Original languageEnglish
Article number2700
Number of pages14
JournalScientific Reports
Volume14
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2024

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments:
This work is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/W010852/1). We would like to thank the University of Birmingham’s BlueBEAR High Performance Computing facility that allowed us to process the simulations provided for this research. For more details, see http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/bear.

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