Prof. Stephen Wilson (University of Strathclyde) gives a research seminar at the School of Mathematics, UEA. The talk is on “Competitive Evaporation of Multiple Droplets”. The abstract is below.

The evaporation of sessile droplets is currently the subject of a great deal of international experimental, numerical and theoretical research activity, but most of the work thus far has, for understandable reasons, focused on the case of a single droplets. However, in practice, droplets rarely occur in isolation and so there is considerable interested in understanding the interactions between multiple evaporating droplets. To this end I shall present recent results on the interactions between two droplets in two dimensions [1] and between multiple thin droplets in three dimensions [2], and, in particular, investigate the effect of these interactions on droplet evolutions and lifetimes, as well as on the famous coffee-ring effect.

[1] Schofield, F.G.H., Wray, A.W., Pritchard, D., Wilson, S.K., The shielding effect extends the lifetimes of two-dimensional sessile droplets, to appear in J. Eng. Maths. (2020)

[2] Wray, A.W., Duffy, B.R., Wilson, S.K., Competitive evaporation of multiple sessile droplets, J. Fluid Mech. 884 A45 (2020)