Quasi-steady vortical structures in vertically vibrating soap films

Abstract

An analysis of the quasi-steady streaming of the liquid in a vertically vibrated horizontal soap film is reported. The air around the soap film is seen to play a variety of roles: it transmits normal and tangential oscillatory stresses to the film, damps out Marangoni waves, and forces non-oscillatory deflection of the film and tangential motion of the liquid. Non-oscillatory volume forcing originating inside the liquid is also analysed. This forcing dominates the quasi-steady streaming when the excitation frequency is close to the eigenfrequency of a Marangoni mode of the soap film, while both volume forcing in the liquid and surface forcing of the gas on the liquid are important when no Marangoni mode resonates. Different manners by which the combined forcings can induce quasi-steady streaming motion are discussed and some numerical simulations of the quasi-steady liquid flow are presented.