A conservative saint-venant type model to describe the dynamics of thin partially wetting films with regularized forces at the contact line

Abstract

This paper deals with the numerical simulation of thin liquid films flowing on partially wetting solid substrates. A 2D Saint-Venant like model is proposed. Its originality lies in the conservative formulation of the capillary forces and in the model used for the disjoining pressure that accounts for the contact line capillary forces. A finite volume scheme is proposed for the resolution of the system and various numerical examples are presented and discussed. In particular, when the mesh resolution is fine enough, the model is proved to be able to predict correctly the spreading of a film with the exact contact angle in the vicinity of the contact line. When the mesh size is larger than the film thickness (which could be the case for many industrial applications), it is of course no longer possible to recover the contact angle. However, the model is proved to correctly predict the spreading of the film. This important feature is related to the thermodynamic consistency of the model in the sense that the latter ensures by construction the decrease of the film total free energy in the absence of external driving forces.