Inertial drag-out problem : sheets and films on a rotating disc

Abstract

The so-called Landau-Levich-Deryaguin problem treats the coating flow dynamics of a thin viscous liquid film entrained by a moving solid surface. In this context, we use a simple experimental set-up consisting of a partially-immersed rotating disc in a liquid tank to study the role of inertia, and also curvature, on liquid entrainment. Using water and UCON$^{\mbox{TM}}$ mixtures, we point out a rich phenomenology in the presence of strong inertia : ejection of multiple liquid sheets on the emerging side of the disc, sheet fragmentation, ligament formation and atomization of the liquid flux entrained over the disc's rim. We focus our study on a single liquid sheet and the related average liquid flow rate entrained over a thin disc for various depth-to-radius ratio $h/R < 1$. We show that the liquid sheet is created via a ballistic mechanism as liquid is lifted out of the pool by the rotating disc. We then show that the flow rate in the entrained liquid film is controlled by both viscous and surface tension forces as in the classical Landau-Levich-Deryaguin problem despite the three dimensional, non-uniform and unsteady nature of the flow, and also despite the large values of the film thickness based flow Reynolds number. When the characteristic Froude and Weber numbers become significant, strong inertial effects influence the entrained liquid flux over the disc at large radius-to-immersion-depth ratio, namely via entrainment by the disc's lateral walls and via a contribution to the flow rate extracted from the 3D liquid sheet itself, respectively.