Numerical study on droplet motions on heterogeneous substrates: from a wettability viewpoint

This thesis numerically studies four kinds of wettability-related droplet motions on solid surfaces, including droplet wetting on stripe-patterned surfaces, droplet flowing in non-wetting capillaries with wettability gradient, droplet sliding on homogeneous and stripe-patterned surfaces, and droplet impacting on groove-patterned surfaces. Numerical method many-body dissipative particle dynamics (MDPD) is used to perform all simulations in this project. For all the droplet motions, the wettability is the core aspect to govern the interaction between the droplet and solid surface while different interaction conditions like driving force, impact velocity, space et al. further affect the specific droplet dynamics on these surfaces.