Instability of a moving contact line

Abstract

We study a solid plate plunging into or being withdrawn from a liquid bath, to highlight the fundamental difference between the local behavior of an advancing or a receding contact line, respectively. It is assumed that the liquid partially wets the solid, making a finite contact angle in equilibrium. In our hydrodynamic description which neglects the presence of the outer gas atmosphere, an advancing dynamic wetting line persists to arbitrarily high speeds. The receding wetting line, on the other hand, vanishes at a critical speed set by the competition between viscous and surface tension forces. In the advancing case, we apply existing matching techniques to the plunging plate geometry, to significantly improve on existing theories. For the receding contact line, we demonstrate for the first time how the local contact line solution can be matched to the far-field meniscus. In doing so, we confirm our very recent criterion for the instability of the receding contact line. The results of both the advancing and the receding cases are tested against simulations of the full model equations.