Water Droplet Avalanches

TL;DR

This study investigates water droplet avalanches under various flow conditions, revealing power-law behavior at low flow rates and exponential scaling at higher flow rates, highlighting different dynamic regimes.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed statistical analysis of water droplet avalanches, identifying scale-invariant behavior and the transition to characteristic scales with flow rate changes.

Findings

Power-law distributions at low flow rates

Exponential distributions at high flow rates

Transition between scale-invariant and characteristic regimes

Abstract

We analyze the statistics of water droplet avalanches in a continuously driven system. Distributions are obtained for avalanche size, lifetime, and time between successive avalanches, along with power spectra and return maps. For low flow rates and different water viscosities, we observe a power-law scaling in the size and lifetime distributions of water droplet avalanches, indicating that a state with no characteristic time and length scales was reached. Higher flow rates resulted in an exponential behavior with characteristic scales.