Thin-film flows on rotating noncircular cylinders with large curvature variations

Chance C Parrish, Marcio S. Carvalho, Satish Kumar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

The coating of rotating objects with varying surface curvature is an important manufacturing step for a wide variety of products. To efficiently examine the flow of liquid coatings on such objects, we develop a lubrication-theory-based model for flow on 2D cross sections of rotating noncircular cylinders whose variations in the radius of curvature are comparable to the characteristic cylinder radius. Good quantitative agreement is found between model predictions and Galerkin finite-element method simulations when the coating thickness is small, whereas qualitative agreement is found for thicker coatings. Encouraged by this agreement, we conduct a parametric study to examine coating behavior on rotating elliptical cylinders. Four regimes of coating behavior are found spanning gravity-dominated and surface-tension-dominated regimes. The parameter space yielding smooth coatings on elliptical cylinders is small, suggesting the need for additional steps such as the addition of surfactant to widen this coating window.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number054002
JournalPhysical Review Fluids
Volume7
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank the Industrial Partnership for Research in Interfacial and Materials Engineering of the University of Minnesota and PPG Industries, Inc. for their support. This material is based upon work also supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CMMI-2100765. We are grateful to the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota for providing computational resources for this research. The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 American Physical Society.

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