Thin Liquid Films with Surfactant
- When?
- Wednesday 20 October 2010, 16:00 to 17:00
- Where?
- 24AA04
- Open to:
- Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Michael Shearer (North Carolina State University)
Abstract: The flow of thin liquid films driven by gravity and surface tension is of interest in a variety of medical and industrial applications. The lubrication approximation of the Stokes system provides a suitable model for thin film flow, and the resulting partial differential equations have a particularly interesting structure for flow in the presence of surfactants.
In this lecture, I discuss traveling waves and other similarity solutions, numerical simulations, and comparison to experiments conducted in the physics lab of Karen Daniels at NC State. The mathematical solutions are able to capture certain quantitative features of the experiments, but some observations of the experiments await explanation.
