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Recent studies have shown that capillary waves generated by bursting of an oil drop at the water-air interface produces a daughter droplet inside the bath while part of it floats above it. Successive bursting events produce next generations of daughter droplets, gradually diminishing in size until the entire volume of oil rests atop the water-air interface. In this work, we demonstrate two different ways to modulate this process by modifying the constitution of the drop. Firstly, we introduce hydrophilic clay particles inside the parent oil drop and show that it arrests the cascade of daughter droplet generation preventing it from floating over the water-air interface. Secondly, we show that bursting behavior can be modified by a compound water-oil-air interface made of a film of oil with finite thickness and design a regime map which displays each of these outcomes. We underpin both of these demonstrations by theoretical arguments providing criteria to predict outcomes resulting therein. Lastly, all our scenarios have a direct relation to control of oil-water separation and stability of emulsified solutions in a wide variety of applications which include drug delivery, enhanced oil recovery, oil spills and food processing where a dispersed oil phase tries to separate from a continuous phase.

The splat formed after drop impact on supercooled solid surfaces sticks to it. On the contrary, a sublimating supercooled surface such as dry ice inhibits pinning and therefore efficiently rebounds drops made of a variety of liquids. While rebound is expected at lower impact velocities on dry ice, at higher impact velocities the drop fragments leaving behind a trail of smaller droplets. However, it is not known whether rebound can be entirely suppressed or fragmentation be controlled on such surfaces and if it depends on the extent of solidification inside the drop. In this work, we report on the role played by solidification within drops in modifying the outcomes of their impact on the supercooled ultra-low adhesive surface of sublimating dry ice. We show that the solidification thickness depends on the impact velocity and is the primary driver in suppression of rebound and also promotes a delay in fragmentation. Our findings imply that sublimating supercooled surfaces can present a broad spectrum of outcomes from complete bouncing to no-rebound which are not seen in drop impacts on supercooled superhydrophobic surfaces. We attribute this to thermo-elastocapillarity which considers bending of the solidified layer and is used to demarcate regime boundaries and determine the coefficient of restitution during rebound.

For decades, researchers worldwide have investigated phenomena related to natural, artificial oil leakages such as oil drop formation within water bodies, their rise, and oil slick evolution after they breach the water-air interface. Despite this, the event leading to slick formation -the bursting of oil drops at the liquid-air interface has remained unnoticed thus far. In this work, we investigate this and report a counterintuitive jetting reversal that releases a daughter oil droplet inside the bulk as opposed to the upwards shooting jets observed in bursting air bubbles. We show that the daughter droplet size thus produced can be correlated to the bulk liquid properties and that its formation can be suppressed by increasing the bulk viscosity or by the addition of microparticles. We further demonstrate the significance of our results by synthesizing colloidal pickered droplets and show applications of bursting compound drops in double emulsions and studies on raindrop impact on a slick. These results could be immensely transformative for diverse areas, including climatology, oceanic, atmospheric sciences, colloidal synthesis and drug delivery.

Oil spills have posed a serious threat to our marine and ecological environment in recent times. Containment of spills proliferating via small drops merging with oceans/seas is especially difficult since their mitigation is closely linked to the coalescence dependent spreading. This inter-connectivity and its dependence on the physical properties of the drop has not been explored until now. Furthermore, pinch-off behavior and scaling laws for such three-phase systems have not been reported. To this end, we investigate the problem of gentle deposition of a single drop of oil on a pool of water, representative of an oil spill scenario. Methodical study of 11 different n-alkanes, polymers and hydrocarbons with varying viscosity and initial spreading coefficients is conducted. Regime map, scaling laws for deformation features and spreading behavior are established. The existence of a previously undocumented regime of delayed coalescence is revealed. It is seen that the inertia-visco-capillary (I-V-C) scale collapses all experimental drop deformation data on a single line while the early stage spreading is found to be either oscillatory or asymptotically reaching a constant value, depending on the viscosity of the oil drop unlike the well reported monotonic, power law late-time spreading behavior. These findings are equally applicable to applications like emulsions and enhanced oil recovery.

Manipulating surface topography is one of the most promising strategies for increasing the efficiency of numerous industrial processes involving droplet contact with superheated surfaces. In such scenarios, the droplets may immediately boil upon contact, splash and boil, or could levitate on their own vapor in the Leidenfrost state. In this work, we report the outcomes of water droplets coming in gentle contact with designed nano/micro-textured surfaces at a wide range of temperatures as observed using high-speed optical and X-ray imaging. We report a paradoxical increase in the Leidenfrost temperature (TLFP) as the texture spacing is reduced below a critical value (~10 um). Although droplets on such textured solids appear to boil upon contact, our studies suggest that their behavior is dominated by hydrodynamic instabilities implying that the increase in TLFP may not necessarily lead to enhanced heat transfer. On such surfaces, the droplets display a new regime characterized by splashing accompanied by a vapor jet penetrating through the droplets before they transition to the Leidenfrost state. We provide a comprehensive map of boiling behavior of droplets over a wide range of texture spacings that may have significant implications towards applications such as electronics cooling, spray cooling, nuclear reactor safety and containment of fire calamities., Comment: Navid Saneie and Varun Kulkarni contributed equally to this work. V1.1, 8 pages, 4 figures

This fluid dynamics video is an entry for the Gallery of Fluid Motion of the 66th Annual Meeting of the APS-DFD. This work reveals new types of interfacial instabilities that occur during forced-spreading of dielectric films subjected to ionic bombardment. We demonstrated that keeping the ionic bombardment strength constant, the appearance of instability patterns dramatically changes by varying viscosity of the bombarded droplet.

This fluid dynamics video is an entry for the Gallery of Fluid Motion of the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS-DFD. This video shows behavior of condensing droplets on a lubricant impregnated surface and a comparison with a superhydrophobic surface. On impregnated surfaces, drops appear like UFOs hovering over a surface. The videos were recorded in an Environmental SEM and a specially built condensation rig., Comment: Videos are included for Gallery of Fluid Motion, APS DFD 2012