Bidisha Bhatt - Dewetting: Thin liquid films to droplets

What happens if we paint a steel box and put a water drop on it before it gets dry? The arcane curiosity arises: Will the paint remain the same or get destroyed? The answer is that it depends on the interaction between the surfaces and the length scale involved. My doctoral work was to study the stability of thin liquid films under aqueous drops. Slippery surfaces were used as a model system because they provide a frictionless surface with low contact angle hysteresis (<2°). We found that thin liquid films are stable on hydrophobic surfaces, while on hydrophilic surfaces, they rupture and dewet into droplets. We observed different dewetting patterns depending on the film thickness and slip. However, films on hydrophobic surfaces are stable but can be destabilized using external perturbations like an electric field. Due to the electric field, capillary waves are generated, and their evolution matches very well with a linear stability analysis. The reversible dewetting behavior with the applied field is an interesting observation of our work. With the applied frequency, the wavelength of the capillary waves does not follow the classical linear stability analysis; we modified the stability analysis, which agrees with our experimental findings. Finally, the coalescence of dewetted droplets and anomalous diffusive behavior with the applied external field will be discussed