Stokes resistance of a solid cylinder near a superhydrophobic surface. Part 1. Grooves perpendicular to cylinder axis

Abstract

An important class of canonical problems that is employed in quantifying the slipperiness of microstructured superhydrophobic surfaces is concerned with the calculation of the hydrodynamic loads on adjacent solid bodies whose size is large relative to the microstructure period. The effect of superhydrophobicity is most pronounced when the latter period is comparable to the separation between the solid probe and the superhydrophobic surface. We address the above distinguished limit, considering a simple configuration where the superhydrophobic surface is formed by a periodically grooved array, in which air bubbles are trapped in a Cassie state, and the solid body is an infinite cylinder. In the present part, we consider the case where the grooves are aligned perpendicular to the cylinder and allow for three modes of rigid-body motion: rectilinear motion perpendicular to the surface; rectilinear motion parallel to the surface, in the groove direction; and angular rotation about the cylinder axis. In this scenario, the flow is periodic in the direction parallel to the axis. Averaging over the small-scale periodicity yields a modified lubrication description where the small-scale details are encapsulated in two auxiliary two-dimensional cell problems which respectively describe pressure- and boundary-driven longitudinal flow through an asymmetric rectangular domain, bounded by a compound surface from the bottom and a no-slip surface from the top. Once the integral flux and averaged shear stress associated with each of these cell problems are calculated as a function of the slowly varying cell geometry, the hydrodynamic loads experienced by the cylinder are provided as quadratures of nonlinear functions of the latter distributions over a continuous sequence of cells.