Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 December 2003
By truncating the range of van der Waals forces in our molecular dynamics model we reduce the lengthscale and timescale gap between the outer (wedge) and inner (precursor) regions in droplet spreading simulations. This results in a molecular model which combines atomic-scale resolution with the ability to capture large-scale behaviour as manifested by the Tanner spreading law. Our results show that Tanner's law can be recovered, even if van der Waals effects and the resulting precursor film are limited to distances of the order of three atomic diameters from the substrate. In other words, removal of the singularity is not necessary up to a few atomic diameters from the contact line. The very good quantitative agreement with theory and experiments suggests that the original precursor theory of de Gennes can be generalized to precursors of molecular thickness in which flow is not characterized by the continuum (Stokes) model. Gravity current simulations are also in excellent agreement with the theory of Huppert and recent experimental results showing lubrication scalings at small capillary numbers.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.