A kinematic evolution equation for the dynamic contact angle and some consequences

Abstract

We investigate the moving contact line problem for two-phase incompressible flows with a kinematic approach. The key idea is to derive an evolution equation for the contact angle in terms of the transporting velocity field. It turns out that the resulting equation has a simple structure and expresses the time derivative of the contact angle in terms of the velocity gradient at the solid wall. Together with the additionally imposed boundary conditions for the velocity, it yields a more specific form of the contact angle evolution. Thus, the kinematic evolution equation is a tool to analyze the evolution of the contact angle. Since the transporting velocity field is required only on the moving interface, the kinematic evolution equation also applies when the interface moves with its own velocity independent of the fluid velocity. We apply the developed tool to a class of moving contact line models which employ the Navier slip boundary condition. We derive an explicit form of the contact angle evolution for sufficiently regular solutions, showing that such solutions are unphysical. Within the simplest model, this rigorously shows that the contact angle can only relax to equilibrium if some kind of singularity is present at the contact line. Moreover, we analyze more general models including surface tension gradients at the contact line, slip at the fluid–fluid interface and mass transfer across the fluid–fluid interface.