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Updated: Jun 25, 2026

Film Control to Study Contributions of Waves to Droplet Impact Dynamics on Thin Flowing Liquid Films
Published on: August 18, 2018
Chaotic bouncing of a droplet on a soap film
1GRASP, Department of Physics B5a, University of Liège, B-4000 Liège, Belgium. Tristan.Gilet@ulg.ac.be
Abstract:
We examine the complex dynamics arising when a water droplet bounces on a horizontal soap film suspended on a vertically oscillating circular frame. A variety of simple and complex periodic bouncing states are observed, in addition to multiperiodicity and period-doubling transitions to chaos. The system is simply and accurately modeled by a single ordinary differential equation, the numerical solution of which captures all the essential features of the observed behavior. Iterative maps and bifurcation diagrams indicate that the system exhibits all the features of a classic low-dimensional chaotic oscillator.
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