Energy stable methods for phase-field simulation of droplet impact with surfactants

TL;DR

This paper develops energy stable numerical schemes for simulating droplet impact with surfactants, capturing complex behaviors like adhesion and splashing, and validates results with experimental comparisons.

Contribution

It introduces unconditionally energy stable schemes for a phase-field model of droplet impact with surfactants, ensuring rigorous energy dissipation and enabling detailed impact dynamics analysis.

Findings

Contaminated droplets dissipate less energy during impact.

Surfactants influence adhesion and splashing phenomena.

Quantitative agreement with experimental results.

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the numerical study of droplet impact on solid substrates in presence of surfactants. We formulate the problem in an energetically variational framework and introduce an incompressible Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes system for the phase-field modeling of two-phase flows. Flory-Huggins potential and generalized Navier boundary condition are used to account for soluble surfactants and moving contact lines. Based on the convex splitting and pressure stabilization technique, we develop unconditionally energy stable schemes for this model. The discrete energy dissipation law for the original energy is rigorously proved for the first-order scheme. The numerical methods are implemented using finite difference method in three-dimensional cylindrical coordinates with axisymmetry. Using the proposed methods for this model, we systematically study the impact dynamics of both clean and contaminated droplets (with surfactants) in a series of numerical experiments. In general, the dissipation in the impact dynamics of a contaminated drop is smaller than that in the clean case, and topological changes are more likely to occur for contaminated drops. Adding surfactants can significantly influence the impact phenomena, leading to the enhancement of adherence effect on hydrophilic surfaces and splashing on hydrophobic surfaces. Some quantitative agreements with experiments are also obtained.