Non-locality of the contact line in dynamic wetting phenomena.

Hypothesis: The notion of the contact line is fundamental to capillary science, where in a large category of wetting phenomena, it was always regarded as a one-dimensional object involving only microscopic length scales. This prevailing opinion had a strong impact and repercussions on the developing theories and methodologies used to interpret experimental data. It is hypothesised that this is not the case under certain conditions leading to non-local effects and requiring the development of a modified force balance at the contact line.

Capillary transport in paper porous materials at low saturation levels: normal, fast or superfast?

The problem of capillary transport in fibrous porous materials at low levels of liquid saturation has been addressed. It has been demonstrated that the process of liquid spreading in this type of porous material at low saturation can be described macroscopically by a similar super-fast, nonlinear diffusion model to that which had been previously identified in experiments and simulations in particulate porous media. The macroscopic diffusion model has been underpinned by simulations using a microscopic network model.

Surface permeability of porous media particles and capillary transport.

We have established previously, in a lead-in study, that the spreading of liquids in particulate porous media at low saturation levels, characteristically less than 10% of the void space, has very distinctive features in comparison to that at higher saturation levels. In particular, we have found that the dispersion process can be accurately described by a special class of partial differential equations, the super-fast non-linear diffusion equation. The results of mathematical modelling have demonstrated very good agreement with experimental observations.

Hydrodynamics of Moving Contact Lines: Macroscopic versus Microscopic.

The fluid-mechanics community is currently divided in assessing the boundaries of applicability of the macroscopic approach to fluid mechanical problems. Can the dynamics of nanodroplets be described by the same macroscopic equations as are used for macrodroplets? To the greatest degree, this question should be addressed to the moving-contact-line problem. The problem is naturally multiscale, where even using slip boundary conditions results in spurious numerical solutions and transcendental stagnation regions in modeling in the vicinity of the contact line.

Dynamic Contact Angle at the Nanoscale: A Unified View.

Generation of a dynamic contact angle in the course of wetting is a fundamental phenomenon of nature. Dynamic wetting processes have a direct impact on flows at the nanoscale, and therefore, understanding them is exceptionally important to emerging technologies. Here, we reveal the microscopic mechanism of dynamic contact angle generation.

Relaxation of surface tension in the liquid-solid interfaces of Lennard-Jones liquids.

We have established the surface tension relaxation time in the liquid-solid interfaces of Lennard-Jones (LJ) liquids by means of direct measurements in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The main result is that the relaxation time is found to be almost independent of the molecular structures and viscosity of the liquids (at 70-fold change) used in our study and lies in such a range that in slow hydrodynamic motion the interfaces are expected to be at equilibrium. The implications of our results for the modeling of dynamic wetting processes and interpretation of dynamic contact angle data are discussed.