Head-on collision of Newtonian drops in a viscoelastic medium

Abstract

Depending on the application, one needs to either stabilize or destabilize the interfacial properties of an emulsion. An aspect of the dynamics that governs the stability of emulsions in general is the drainage time of the film that is formed when two drops collide. In this work, we study the effect that viscoelasticity of the matrix fluid has on this drainage time of two Newtonian drops that perform a head-on collision under an applied macroscopic extensional rate. For the modeling of the viscoelastic matrix material, the Giesekus model is chosen. A cylindrical coordinate system is applied with imposed axisymmetry and the resulting equations are solved using fully resolved numerical simulations employing a finite element discretization. Our results show that viscoelasticity reduces the drainage time, which is a combined effect of three different stages.