A Thermodynamically Consistent Model and Its Conservative Numerical Approximation for Moving Contact Lines with Soluble Surfactants

TL;DR

This paper develops a thermodynamically consistent continuum model for moving contact lines with soluble surfactants, including detailed boundary conditions, and proposes a finite element numerical method that conserves surfactant mass, applied to droplet spreading.

Contribution

It introduces a new thermodynamically consistent model with derived boundary conditions and a conservative numerical scheme for simulating surfactant-influenced contact line dynamics.

Findings

Numerical method conserves total surfactant mass exactly.

Model captures droplet spreading and migration with surfactants.

Study reveals dependencies on adsorption parameters.

Abstract

We derive a continuum sharp-interface model for moving contact lines with soluble surfactants in a thermodynamically consistent framework. The model consists of the isothermal two-phase incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for the fluid dynamic and the bulk\slash surface convection-diffusion equations for the surfactant transportation. The interface condition, the slip boundary condition, the dynamic contact angle condition, and the adsorption\slash desorption condition are derived based on the principle of the total free energy dissipation. In particular, we recover classical adsorption isotherms from different forms of the surface free energy. The model is then numerically solved in two spatial dimensions. We present an Eulerian weak formulation for the Navier-Stokes equations together with an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian weak formulation for the surfactant transport equations. Finite element approximations are proposed to discretize the two weak formulations on the moving mesh. The resulting numerical method is shown to conserve the total mass of the surfactants exactly. By using the proposed model and its numerical method, we investigate the droplet spreading and migration in the presence of surfactants and study their dependencies on various dimensionless adsorption parameters.