Droplet rebound from rigid or strongly hydrophobic surfaces

Abstract

A weakly deformable droplet impinging on a rigid surface rebounds if the surface is intrinsically hydrophobic or if the gas film trapped underneath the droplet is able to keep the interfaces from touching. A simple, physically motivated model inspired by analysis of droplets colliding with deformable interfaces is proposed in order to investigate the dynamics of the rebound process and the effects of gravity. The analysis yields estimates of the bounce time that are in very good quantitative agreement with recent experimental data (Okumura et. al., (2003)) and provides significant improvement over simple scaling results.