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Summer Program Seminars 2006

Thursday, June 1, 2006 @ 10:00AM
Cullimore Hall, Room 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Instabilities of Evaporating Droplets

Nebojsa Murisic

Department of Mathematical Sciences

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Newark, New Jersey

ABSTRACT

Motivation for this work comes from a curious phenomenon that was first observed in the semiconductor industry.  Droplets of alcohol and/or water are depostied upon a wafer surface and left to dry.  Alcohol droplets develop "octopus"-shaped instabilities close to the contact line.  We try to model this phenomenon using a mathematical model based on the Navier-Stokes equations together with appropriate boundary conditions in the lubrication (or thin drop) limit.  We derive a single equation for the evolution of the drop's thickness, and carry out a linear stability analysis and numerical solution of it.  The "octopus"-shaped instabilities are recovered in our numerical results.