Wetting dynamics of thin liquid films and drops under Marangoni and centrifugal forces

This paper presents an experimental study on thin liquid drops and films under the combined action of centrifugal forces due to rotation and radial Marangoni forces due to a corresponding temperature gradient. We shall examine thinning of a given liquid layer both with and without rotation and also consider the onset of the fingering instability in a completely wetting liquid drop. In many of the experiments described here, we use an interferometric technique which provides key information on height profiles. For thick rotating films in the absence of a temperature gradient, when an initially thick layer of fluid is spun to angular velocities where the classical Newtonian solution is negative, the fluid never dewets for the case of a completely wetting fluid, but leaves a microscopic uniform wet layer in the center. Similar experiments with a radially inward temperature gradient reveal the evolution of a radial height profile given by h(r) = A(t)r(α), where A(t) decays logarithmically with time, and [Formula: see text]. In the case where there is no rotation, small centrally placed drops show novel retraction behavior under a sufficiently strong temperature gradient. Using the same interferometric arrangement, we observed the onset of the fingering instability of small drops placed at the center of the rotating substrate in the absence of a temperature gradient. At the onset of the instability, the height profile for small drops is more complex than previously assumed.