Bouncing Droplet on a Soap Film

Introduction

In this project we developed a numerical method to simulate the interaction of a liquid droplet with a soap film. This work was motivated by experiments performed by Gilet and Bush (JFM 2008) at MIT. Our main contribution is to show the importance of treating the liquid/gas interface and the soap film interfaces as surface discontinuities rather than smeared. Our method is able to reproduce the main experimental results from Gilet and Bush. We used our technique to investigate the importance of the landing phase shift of the droplet with respect to the forcing (an otherwise difficult experimental task). This allowed us to extract relationships between the bouncing phase and the specific mode on which the droplet locks.

No External Forcing

[Click on the pictures below for movies in DIVX format]

Bouncing Regime – We=12

Break-Through Regime – We=22

Partial Break-Through Regime – We=18

Side view

Standard view

Periodic Forcing

We0=12 – forcing frequency= 45Hz / Amplitude= 2.5g

Bouncing mode (2,2)

We0=12 – forcing frequency= 33Hz / Amplitude= 0.6g

Bouncing mode (1,1)

Much more to come very soon …

Relevant Publications:

J.C. Nave, “Numerical Simulation of a Bouncing Droplet on a Soap Film”, (in preparation)

J.C. Nave, S. Banerjee, X.D. Liu, “A Method for the Direct Numerical Simulation of Liquid Films with Large Interfacial Deformation”, J. Comp. Phys. (submitted) PDF

S. Banerjee, V. Badalassi, V. Dwivedi, J.-C. Nave, D. Hall, “The Direct Numerical Simulation of Two-Phase Flows with Interface Capturing Methods”, La Houille Blanche, (2005) PDF

J.C. Nave, “Direct Numerical Simulation of Liquid Films”, UCSB Ph.D. Thesis (2004) PDF

Last Modified by Jean-Christophe Nave - December 2008