Relaxation of ellipsoidal droplets

The aim of the project is to understand how a droplet (initially an ellipsoid) relaxes.
This is crucially important as it has been observed that droplets after coalescence have an ellipsoid like shape, this phenomenon is thus frequently encountered in nature as well as in microfluidic applications. Many features on how an ellipsoidal droplet relaxes have been studied both numerically and experimentally (Stone et al. 1989), more recent studies have been carried on in confined geometries and have shown that surprisingly an elliptic doesn’t relax following successive elliptic shapes (Brun et al.). In the framework of this project the relaxation of an unbounded droplet will be considered, the relaxation path will be analyzed and eventually a model following the previously cited paper will be proposed. The droplet relaxation will be simulated numerically, these will be carried on with an in house code implementing BEM (boundary element method). The code is written in MATLAB and therefore a good knowledge of the software is required.

Supervisor: Giacomo Gallino