The Accurate Modelling of Thin 3D Fluid Flows with Inertia on Curved Substrates

Abstract

Models and simulations of the flow of thin films of fluids have many important applications in industrial and natural processes. We consider the motion of a thin layer of an incompressible, Newtonian fluid over an arbitrary solid, stationary curved substrate. Earlier work by Roy, et al has modeled slow fluid flows in which inertia is negligible. However, in many applications a model expressed in terms of both the fluid layer thickness and the average lateral velocity is needed to resolve faster dynamics. Here we use centre manifold techniques to derive such a non-dimensional, approximate model of the three dimensional flow.