Convective inertia effects in wall-bounded thin film flows

Abstract

We apply the boundary layer equations to inertial flow in wall bounded films that might be characterized as ‘thin’, say ɛ ≤ 0.1 where ɛ is the ratio of the characteristic lengths, yet to which the lubrication approximation of Reynolds no longer applies. Two particular flow geometries are investigated, nominally parallel plates and nominally inclined plates, both with and without spatially periodic perturbation of the stationary plate. A Galerkin-B spline formulation of the governing equations is employed, and we rely on parametric continuation to obtain solutions at higher values of the Reynolds number. In particular, we are able to demonstrate that the boundary layer equations yield accurate results for a wide range of Reynolds numbers when the aspect ratio is less than 1/10. We also find that in both nominally parallel and nominally inclined geometries the sign of the inertial force correction is determined by the film contour in the neighborhood of the exit, this result might have implications in the design of MEMS devices.