Impact of a heterogeneous liquid droplet on a dry surface: Application to the pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

Droplet impact has been studied for over a hundred years dating back to the pioneering work of Worthington [ 1]. In fact, much of his ingenuity contributed to modern day high speed photography. Over the past 40 years significant contributions in theoretical, numerical, and experimental work have been made. Droplet impact is a problem of fundamental importance due to the wealth of applications involved, namely, spray coating, spray painting, delivery of agricultural chemicals, spray cooling, inkjet printing, soil erosion due to rain drop impact, and turbine wear. Here we highlight one specific application, spray coating. Although most studies have focused their efforts on low viscosity Newtonian fluids, many industrial applications such as spray coating utilize more viscous and complex rheology liquids. Determining dominant effects and quantifying their behavior for colloidal suspensions and polymer solutions remains a challenge and thus has eluded much effort. In the last decade, it has been shown that introducing polymers to Newtonian solutions inhibits the rebounding of a drop upon impact, Bergeron et al. [2]. Furthermore Bartolo et al. [3] concluded that the normal stress component of the elongational viscosity was responsible for the rebounding inhibition of polymer based non-Newtonian solutions. We aim to uncover the drop impact dynamics of highly viscous Newtonian and complex rheology liquids used in pharmaceutical coating processes. The generation and impact of drops of mm and μm size drops of coating liquids and glycerol/water mixtures on tablet surfaces are systematically studied over a range of We ∼ O (1–300), Oh ∼ O (10 − 2 –1), and Re ∼ O (1–700). We extend the range of Oh to values above 1, which are not available to previous studies of droplet impacts. Outcomes reveal that splashing and rebounding are completely inhibited and the role of wettability is negligible in the early stages of impact. The maximum spreading diameter of the drop is compared with three models demonstrating reasonable agreement.