Experimental study of drop impact on a thin fiber

Abstract

In this paper, we present an experimental study of drop impact on a thin flexible fiber. Detailed dynamics of the collision was captured with a high-speed video camera. Previous studies have presented three modes: capturing, single drop falling, and splitting. However, in our experiments, we observed that a low-speed drop could bounce off a thin fiber. Moreover, the splitting mode was segmented into two different types: low-speed splitting and high-speed splitting. Based on systematic experiments, we rebuilt a regime map consisting of capturing, low-speed splitting, single drop falling, and high-speed splitting. Both the upper and the lower limits of the low-speed splitting were presented. Fiber wettability was found to play an important role in the impact results. Low-speed splitting vanished when a water drop impacts on a nylon fiber coated with a layer of hydrophilic material. Meanwhile, a theoretical model was proposed to predict the fiber dynamics, which fitted well with the experimental results.