Dynamics of island-meniscus coalescence in free-standing smectic films

In free-standing smectic films islands (regions of larger thickness than the film) can be considered as two-dimensional analogues of liquid droplets in a three-dimensional medium. The dynamics of droplet coalescence is an important but up to now incompletely solved problem in non-equilibrium mechani...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Soft matter 2020-09, Vol.16 (36), p.856-8511
Main Authors: Dolganov, P. V, Shuravin, N. S, Dolganov, V. K, Kats, E. I
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Coalescence
Coalescing
Droplets
Liquid surfaces
Thickness
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In free-standing smectic films islands (regions of larger thickness than the film) can be considered as two-dimensional analogues of liquid droplets in a three-dimensional medium. The dynamics of droplet coalescence is an important but up to now incompletely solved problem in non-equilibrium mechanics. Here, we report on our investigations of island coalescence with the film meniscus. This phenomenon is analogous to the coalescence of a 3D droplet with a flat liquid surface. We found that the time evolution of island dimension is described by universal power-law dependencies for different stages of coalescence. Limited agreement with existing theory was found. In particular, in the final stage of coalescence the domain dynamics differs from theoretical predictions. In free-standing smectic films coalescence of 2D islands (domains of larger thickness) with the 3D meniscus is characterized by nontrivial time dependence of the domain form and its dimensions H , W , and L .
ISSN:1744-683X
1744-6848
DOI:10.1039/d0sm00791a