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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Film Control to Study Contributions of Waves to Droplet Impact Dynamics on Thin Flowing Liquid Films
Published on: August 18, 2018
Flower patterns in drop impact on thin liquid films
Guillaume Lagubeau1, Marco A Fontelos, Christophe Josserand
1LAUM, UMR CNRS 6613, Avenue Olivier Messiaen, 72085 Le Mans Cedex 9, France.
Abstract:
We describe experimentally the formation of a pattern for drop impacts on thin liquid films for a large range of impact parameters. Using the shallow-water approximation, we are able to explain the main mechanisms leading to these patterns: it consists in the linear instability of the self-similar axisymmetric radial solution of the equations. Agreement between the experiments and the theory is remarkably good, leading, in particular, to the prediction that the most unstable fold number scales like (We/h∞)2/7.
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