A contact line force model for the simulation of drop impacts on solid surfaces using volume of fluid methods
Adolfo Esteban, Pablo Gómez, Claudio Zanzi, Joaquín López, Markus Bussmann, Julio Hernández
Abstract
Characterizing the contact line dynamics on solid walls is often a crucial problem encountered in the simulation of complex interfacial unsteady flows, such as drop impacts on solid surfaces. In this work, a new model is proposed to reproduce the contact line dynamics in a simple but effective way, based on introducing in the momentum equation a force term proportional to the deviation of the calculated contact angle from the value predicted by a dynamic model that takes into account wettability hysteresis. The model has been implemented in a volume of fluid (VOF) method and is applied to the simulation of drop impacts leading to deposition outcomes, although it could be extended to other interface tracking methods and is also applicable to more complex drop impacts involving fingering and splashing. Numerous tests have been performed to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed model over a wide range of Reynolds and Weber numbers. The results substantially improve those obtained by imposing only the contact angle as a boundary condition at the contact line, and satisfactorily predict a variety of experimental results from the literature for very different impact and wettability conditions.