Deposition of shear-thinning viscoelastic fluids by an elongated bubble in a circular channel regarding the weakly elastic regime

Abstract

Thin-film deposition of fluids is ubiquitous in a wide range of engineering and biological applications, such as surface coating, polymer processing, and biomedical device fabrication. While the thin viscous film deposition in Newtonian fluids has been extensively investigated, the deposition dynamics in frequently encountered non-Newtonian complex fluids remain elusive, with respect to predictive scaling laws for the film thickness. Here, we investigate the deposition of thin films of shear-thinning viscoelastic fluids by the motion of a long bubble translating in a circular capillary tube. Considering the weakly elastic regime with a shear-thinning viscosity, we provide a quantitative measurement of the film thickness with systematic experiments. We further harness the recently developed hydrodynamic lubrication theory to quantitatively rationalize our experimental observations considering the effective capillary number $C{a}_e$ and the effective Weissenberg number $W{i}_e$, which describe the shear-thinning and the viscoelastic effects on the film formation, respectively. The obtained scaling law agrees reasonably well with the experimentally measured film thickness for all test fluids. Our work may potentially advance the fundamental understanding of the thin-film deposition in a confined geometry and provide valuable engineering guidance for processes that incorporate thin-film flows and non-Newtonian fluids.