Capillary effects on floating cylindrical particles

Abstract

In this study, we develop a systematic perturbation procedure in the small parameter, B1/2, where B is the Bond number, to study capillary effects on small cylindrical particles at interfaces. Such a framework allows us to address many problems involving particles on flat and curved interfaces. In particular, we address four specific problems: (i) capillary attraction between cylinders on flat interface, in which we recover the classical approximate result of Nicolson [“The interaction between floating particles,” Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 45, 288–295 (1949)10.1017/S0305004100024841], thus putting it on a rational basis; (ii) capillary attraction and aggregation for an infinite array of cylinders arranged on a periodic lattice, where we show that the resulting Gibbs elasticity obtained for an array can be significantly larger than the two cylinder case; (iii) capillary force on a cylinder floating on an arbitrary curved interface, where we show that in the absence of gravity, the cylinder experiences a lateral force which is proportional to the gradient of curvature; and (iv) capillary attraction between two cylinders floating on an arbitrary curved interface. The present perturbation procedure does not require any restrictions on the nature of curvature of the background interface and can be extended to other geometries.