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Dynamics of a liquid film flowing down a granular chain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2025

Kishor Kumar Sarva ,
Tejas G. Murthy  and
Gaurav Tomar Open the ORCID record for Gaurav Tomar [Opens in a new window]
Kishor Kumar Sarva
Affiliation:
Interdisciplinary Center for Energy Research (ICER), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India
Tejas G. Murthy
Affiliation:
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India
Gaurav Tomar*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India
*
Corresponding author: Gaurav Tomar, gtom@iisc.ac.in
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Abstract

A liquid film flowing down a fibre becomes unstable, leading to the formation of droplets that travel downstream. The droplet spacing and speed depend on the flow rate for a given nozzle and fibre radii. We show that fibre morphology further modifies the droplet spacing. In particular, we study the effect of the size of the beads in a granular chain on the evolution of the film thickness. We show that, when the size of the bead exceeds a critical value, the selection mechanism for instability modes is modified from regularly spaced droplets to coarsening by droplet merging. Droplet formation for flow over a single bead on the fibre is modified successively over subsequent beads in the downstream. Further, we show that if the perturbation in the flow produced by the bead is introduced as a velocity perturbation at the nozzle inlet, the formation of droplets on the fibre is qualitatively similar to that for the bead.

JFM classification

Interfacial Flows (free surface): Interfacial Flows (free surface) Interfacial Flows (free surface): Thin films Drops and Bubbles: Drops

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 1016 , 10 August 2025 , A36
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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