Drops can Perpetually Bounce over a Vibrating Wettable Solid

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that drops can be made to bounce perpetually on a vibrating solid surface, extending the bouncing duration significantly and enabling precise control of small liquid quantities in air.

Contribution

It is the first to show prolonged bouncing of drops on a vibrating solid surface and introduces a coupled spring model to predict trajectories without fitting parameters.

Findings

Vibration of a smooth mica surface extends bouncing time from seconds to minutes.

Transition between bouncing and bound states is governed by excitation of spherical harmonic modes.

The coupled spring model accurately predicts bouncing trajectories.

Abstract

On the surface of a vibrating liquid bath, instead of coalescing, a drop will continually bounce on a thin film of air between the drop and the free surface, giving rise to rich chaotic dynamics and quantum analog behavior. However, perpetual bouncing is yet to be demonstrated on a vibrating rigid solid, where the control of the drop's motion is not limited by the bath dynamics. Here we show that vibration of an atomically smooth mica surface prolongs a drop's hovering state by several orders of magnitude, increasing the time to wet from less than a second to several minutes. The excitation of the second spherical harmonic mode determines a transition between a bouncing state with high-amplitude rebounds, and a bound state, where the drop's motion is locked onto the vibrating solid above a thin air layer. We further develop a coupled linear spring model, accounting for the drop's deformation, that predicts bouncing trajectories without fitting parameters. Our results extend the scope of bouncing drop studies beyond the liquid bath and highlight the potential for precision manipulation of small liquid quantities in air.