Capillary filling in microchannels with wall corrugations: a comparative study of the Concus-Finn criterion by...

We study the impact of wall corrugations in microchannels on the process of capillary filling by means of three broadly used methods: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), lattice Boltzmann equations (LBE), and molecular dynamics (MD). The numerical results of these approaches are compared and tested against the Concus-Finn (CF) criterion, which predicts pinning of the contact line at rectangular ridges perpendicular to flow for contact angles of theta > 45 degrees . Whereas for theta = 30, 40 (no flow), and 60 degrees (flow) all methods are found to produce data consistent with the CF criterion, at theta = 50 degrees the numerical experiments provide different results. Whereas the pinning of the liquid front is observed both in the LB and CFD simulations, MD simulations show that molecular fluctuations allow front propagation even above the critical value predicted by the deterministic CF criterion, thereby introducing a sensitivity to the obstacle height.