title: Influence of substrate elasticity on droplet impact dynamics.
abstract: Droplet impact dynamics is vital to the understanding of several phase-change and heat-transfer phenomena. This work examines the role of substrate elasticity on the spreading and retraction behavior of water droplets impacting flat and textured superhydrophobic substrates. Experiments reveal that droplet retraction on flat surfaces decreases with decreasing substrate elasticity. This trend is confirmed through a careful measurement of droplet impact dynamics on multiple PDMS surfaces with varying elastic moduli and comparison with impact dynamics on hard silicon surfaces. These findings reveal that surfaces tend to become more wettable upon droplet impact as the elastic modulus is decreased. First-order analyses are developed to explain this reduced retraction in terms of increased viscoelastic dissipation on soft substrates. Interestingly, superhydrophobic surfaces display substrate-elasticity-invariant impact dynamics. These findings are critical when designing polymeric surfaces for fluid-surface interaction applications.
authors: General Electric Global Research, Niskayuna, New York 12309, USA. alizadeh@research.ge.com
authors: Azar
authors: A
authors: Alizadeh
authors: Vaibhav
authors: V
authors: Bahadur
authors: Wen
authors: W
authors: Shang
authors: Yun
authors: Y
authors: Zhu
authors: Donald
authors: D
authors: Buckley
authors: Ali
authors: A
authors: Dhinojwala
authors: Manohar
authors: M
authors: Sohal