Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulation of Liquid Drop Impinging Hypoelastic Surfaces

The phenomenon of liquid drops impact on elastic surfaces widely exists in nature and industry. Theoretical description of this phenomenon is relatively difficult, due to its transient and fluid–structure interaction nature. In this study, a numerical model is proposed based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method to simulate a liquid drop impact on hypoelastic solid surfaces. A key feature of the proposed model is that the surface tension effect is modeled by reconstructing the free surface of the droplet. We simulate water drops impact on super-hydrophobic cantilever beams. Interesting phenomena of droplet bouncing and beam vibration are reproduced by the model. The predicted behavior qualitatively agrees with the experimental observation. These analyses may be beneficial to engineering new materials and new devices in such areas as fabrics, agriculture, petroleum, and micro/nano technology.