Capillary bridges between a plane and a cylindrical wall

Abstract

We report experimental, theoretical and numerical results on the shapes of liquid menisci connecting a planar boundary and the surface of a horizontal cylinder placed above. The gradient of confinement traps the wetting drops in the most confined regions, which promotes their elongation along the line of smallest gap between the walls. The experimental shapes of these stretched capillary bridges are shown to be in good quantitative agreement with the numerical solution of the equation describing their contour. In particular, we show that the measured shapes are better described when taking into account the correction resulting from the coupling of in-plane and transverse interfacial curvatures calculated by Park & Homsy (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 139, 1984, pp. 291–308) over thirty years ago.