Film coating by directional droplet spreading on fibers

Abstract

Plants and insects use slender conical structures to transport and collect small droplets, which are propelled along the conical structures due to capillary action. These droplets can deposit a fluid film during their motion, but despite its importance to many biological systems and industrial applications, the properties of the deposited film are unknown. We characterize the film deposition by developing an asymptotic analysis together with experimental measurements and numerical simulations based on the lubrication equation. We show that the deposited film thickness depends significantly on both the fiber radius and the droplet size, highlighting that the coating is affected by finite-size effects relevant to film deposition on fibers of any slender geometry. We demonstrate that by changing the droplet size, while the mean fiber radius and the capillary number are fixed, the thickness of the deposited film can change by an order of magnitude or more. We show that self-propelled droplets have significant potential to create passively coated structures.