Predicting the spreading behavior of droplets on a wall is important for designing micro/nano devices used for reagent dispensation in micro-electro-mechanical systems, printing processes of ink-jet printers, and condensation of droplets on a wall during spray forming in atomizers. Particle methods are useful for simulating the behavior of many droplets generated by micro/nano devices in practical computational time; the motion of each droplet is simulated using a group of particles, and no particles are assigned in the gas region if interactions between the droplets and gas are weak. Furthermore, liquid-gas interfaces obtained from the particle method remain sharp by using the Lagrangian description.
However, conventional surface tension models used in the particle methods are used for predicting the static contact angle at a three-phase interface, not for predicting the dynamic contact angle. The dynamic contact angle defines the shape of a spreading droplet on a wall. We previously developed a surface tension model using inter-particle force in the particle method; the static contact angle of droplets on the wall was verified at various contact angles, and the heights of droplets agreed well with those obtained theoretically. In this study, we applied our surface tension model to the simulation of a spreading droplet on a wall. The simulated dynamic contact angles for some Weber numbers were compared with those measured by Šikalo et al, and they agreed well. Our surface tension model was useful for simulating droplet motion under static and dynamic conditions.
A New Surface Tension Model for Particle Methods with Enhanced Splash Computation