Rupture of Liquid Bridges on Porous Tips: Competing Mechanisms of Spontaneous Imbibition and Stretching.

Abstract

Liquid bridges are commonly encountered in nature and the liquid transfer induced by their rupture is widely used in various industrial applications. In this work, with the focus on the porous tip, we studied the impacts of capillary effects on the liquid transfer induced by the rupture through numerical simulations. To depict the capillary effects of a porous tip, a time scale ratio, RT, is proposed to compare the competing mechanisms of spontaneous imbibition and external drag. In terms of RT, we then develop a theoretical model for estimating the liquid retention ratio considering the geometry, porosity, and wettability of tips. The mechanism presented in this work provides a possible approach to control the liquid transfer with better accuracy in microfluidics or microfabrications.