Numerical Simulation of Droplet Impacting and Sliding on Hydrophobic Granular Surfaces

Droplet sliding naturally happens with practical significance in developing artificial self-cleaning surfaces or impermeable barriers. On water-repellent soil surfaces, such processes evolve at very small scales, typically at the particle level. To address this, this paper presents a two-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann (LB) study on the droplet sliding dynamics on a layer of regularly arranged particles with varying size and contact angle (CA) aimed at mimicking conditions comparable to those of real soils. The numerical droplet is initialized above the inclined granular surface with different lifting distances and deposited by gravity. The droplet hits the surface with different impacting velocities and subsequently slides down the slope. Four droplet-sliding behaviors were observed: a droplet sticks to the granular surface, a droplet moves by pinning and depinning of its interface (“stick-slip”), a droplet undergoes periodic elongation and shortening during sliding, and a droplet lifts off the granular surface and may be ruptured. For a droplet that displays the “stick-slip” behavior, the sliding velocity reaches a converged terminal velocity, which increases with a higher CA, a more inclined slope, and a smaller particle size. However, nonunique terminal velocities were identified to be affected by the impacting velocities, but their correlation is not continuous and may not be positive. Finally, we propose to quantify the rotational or translational movement by effective kinematic ratio (EKR), which is defined as the translational kinematic energy divided by the total kinematic energy. The unique relation between the EKR and the terminal velocity is suggested to be one practical indicator to intrinsically characterize the water repellency at the particle level.