Droplet motion on chemically heterogeneous substrates with mass transfer. I. Two-dimensional dynamics

Abstract

We consider the dynamics of thin two-dimensional viscous droplets on chemically heterogeneous surfaces moving under the combined effects of slip, mass transfer and capillarity. The resulting long-wave evolution equation for the droplet thickness is treated analytically via the method of matched asymptotic expansions in the limit of slow mass transfer rates, quasi-static dynamics and vanishingly small slip lengths to deduce a lower-dimensional system of integrodifferential equations for the two moving fronts. We demonstrate that the predictions of the deduced system agree excellently with simulations of the full model for a number of representative cases within the domain of applicability of the analysis. Specifically, we focus on situations where the mass of the drop changes periodically to highlight a number of interesting features of the dynamics, which include stick-slip, hysteresis-like effects, as well as the possibility for the droplet to alternate between the constant-radius and constant-angle stages which have been previously reported in related works. These features of the dynamics are further scrutinized by investigating how the bifurcation structure of droplet equilibria evolves as the mass of the droplet varies.