title: Stretching liquid bridges with bubbles: the effect of air bubbles on liquid transfer.
abstract: Liquid bridges containing bubbles are relevant to industrial printing and are also a topic of fundamental scientific interest. We use flow visualization to study the stretching of liquid bridges, both with and without bubbles, at low capillary numbers. We find that whereas the breakup of wetting fluids between two identical surfaces is symmetric about the bridge midpoint, contact line pinning breaks this symmetry at slow stretching speeds for nonwetting fluids. We exploit this observation to force air bubbles selectively toward the least hydrophilic plate confining the liquid bridge.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, United States.
authors.forename: Shawn
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dodds
authors.forename: Marcio S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Carvalho
authors.forename: Satish
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kumar