https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-02367-1
Regular Article
Dynamics of thin fluid films controlled by thermal fluctuations
1 Departamento de Matemáticas and Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911 Leganés, Spain
2 Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain
3 Department of Mathematical Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA
a e-mail: snesic@math.uc3m.es
Received: 30 July 2014
Revised: 16 February 2015
Published online: 8 April 2015
We consider the influence of thermal fluctuations on the dynamics of thin fluid films in two regimes. Working within the stochastic lubrication approximation, we generalize the results on (stochastic) similarity solutions [B. Davidovitch, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 244505 (2005)] that focused on surface tension dominated regime, to gravity-driven relaxation. In particular, we verify numerically the validity of the results in gravity-dominated regime, and find that fluctuations enhance spreading, as in surface tension dominated regime, even in the presence of a faster deterministic relaxation. Considering further the novel case of fluid droplet spreading driven by surface tension and van der Waals forces, our simulations show that the presence of noise affects the value of droplet contact angle.
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2015