A sharp interface approach for wetting dynamics of coated droplets and soft particles

Abstract

The wetting dynamics of liquid particles, from coated droplets to soft capsules, holds significant technological interest. Motivated by the need to simulate liquid metal droplets with an oxidized surface layer, in this work, we introduce a computational scheme that allows us to simulate droplet dynamics with general surface properties and model different levels of interface stiffness, also describing cases that are intermediate between pure droplets and capsules. Our approach is based on a combination of the immersed boundary and the lattice Boltzmann methods. Here, we validate our approach against the theoretical predictions in the context of shear flow and static wetting properties, and we show its effectiveness in accessing the wetting dynamics, exploring the ability of the scheme to address a broad phenomenology.