Absolute and convective instabilities in a non-local model that arises in the analysis of thin-film flows over flat or corrugated walls in the presence of an applied electric field are discussed. Electrified liquid films arise, for example, in coating processes where liquid films are deposited onto a target surfaces with a view to producing an evenly coating layer. In practice, the target surface, or substrate, may be irregular in shape and feature corrugations or indentations. This may lead to non-uniformities in the thickness of the coating layer. Attempts to mitigate film-surface irregularities can be made using, for example, electric fields. We analyse the stability of such thin-film flows and show that if the amplitude of the wall corrugations and/or the strength of the applied electric field is increased the convectively unstable flow undergoes a transition to an absolutely unstable flow
Funding
Financial support from the EPSRC under grant EP/K041134/1. The work of DT and MGB was partly supported by the London Mathematical Society under the grant 41114. The work of DT was additionally supported by the EPSRC under grant EP/J001740/1.
History
School
Science
Department
Mathematical Sciences
Published in
4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference
Citation
TSELUIKO, D., BLYTH, M.G. and PAPAGEORGIOU, D.T., 2014. Absolute and convective instabilities in non-local active-dissipative equations arising in the modelling of thin liquid films. IN:König, C.S., Karayiannis, T.G., Balabani, S. (eds) 4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference, University College London, 7-10 September 2014.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2014
Notes
This is a conference paper presented at the 4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference, University College London, UK, 7-10 September 2014 http://www.mnf2014.com/index.htm