Experimental Characterization of Front Propagation by Marangoni Forces in Ultrathin Liquid Films

• Main Author: Lee, Lisa Mannan
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: Lee, Lisa Mannan (2014) Experimental Characterization of Front Propagation by Marangoni Forces in Ultrathin Liquid Films. Senior thesis (Major), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/3PAM-KD07. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:02132018-131916161 <https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:02132018-131916161>

Italian physicist Carlo Marangoni published a treatise in 1865 which first described the spontaneous flow of a liquid film caused by gradients in surface t ension at a gas/liquid interface. Such gradients are established by variations in surface concentration of molecular species which lower the surface tension in proportion to the interface concentration. While the dynamics and power law behavior of the initial circular advancing front in surfactant coated films has been studied for about two decades, there has been relatively little work conducted on characterizing the fractal spreading patterns which develop behind this front. In this thesis, we examine the dynamics of front propagation and subsequent fractal evolution in ultrathin liquid films of glycerol driven to spread by concentration gradients in Aerosol OT, an insoluble anionic surfactant. We vary only the initial deposition volume and concentration while maintaining the initial liquid film thickness at 2.5 microns. Contrary to theoretical analyses in the literature, our results reveal that the coefficient and exponent characterizing the advance of both the first front as well as the following unstable front is not a constant depending only on geometry (i.e. rectilinear vs axisymmetric spreading) but varies with the initial surfactant concentration of the deposition volume. Furthermore, the overall speed of the fronts is observed to increase with ambient relative humidity, an effect we ascribe to a reduction in the viscosity of the glycerol film clue to absorption of water from the ambient atmosphere. Only in cases of relatively high humidity (higher than approximately 40% relative humidity) do we observe the formation of fractal patterns in the unstable front. Measurements of the fractal dimension yield values in the range 1.45-1.65. The largest values approximate those fractal dimensions observed in systems undergoing diffusion driven aggregation or viscous fingering, neither of which mechanism is pertinent to Marangoni flow.