Marangoni Bursting: Insight into the Role of the Thermocapillary Effect in an Oil Bath

Marangoni bursting describes the spontaneous spread of a droplet of a binary mixture of alcohol/water deposited on a bath of oil, followed by its fast spontaneous fragmentation into a large number of smaller droplets in a self-similar way. Several papers have aimed to describe the physical phenomena underlying this spectacular phenomenon, in which two opposite effects, solutal and thermal Marangoni stresses, play competitive roles. We performed investigations of the Marangoni bursting phenomenon, paying attention to the surface temperature changes during bursting and after it. Fragmentation instabilities were monitored using a thermal camera for various initial alcohol/water compositions and at different stages of the process. We uncovered the role of thermocapillary Marangoni flows within the more viscous oil phase that are responsible for outward and inward shrinking of the periphery circle at the final stage of the phenomenon, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the thermal Marangoni effect. Simulations of the Marangoni thermocapillary effect in an oil bath by solving coupled Navier–Stokes and heat transport equations using the COMSOL Multiphysics software platform support our experimental observations.