Thin Film Traveling Waves and the Navier Slip Condition

Abstract

We consider the lubrication model for a thin film driven by competing gravitational forces and thermal gradients on an inclined plane. We are interested in the general traveling wave problem when the Navier slip boundary condition is used. We contrast (1) gravity dominated flow, (2) Marangoni dominated flow, and (3) flow in which the two driving effects balance. For a "singular slip" model we show that when Marangoni forces are present the resulting traveling wave ODE reduces locally near the contact line to a case not considered previously in the literature. We compute an asymptotic expansion of the solution near the contact line and compare with numerical simulations of the full problem. Using numerical simulations and phase space analysis involving Poincaré sections, we show that for all three problems there is a finite range of admissible contact angles for which traveling wave solutions exist. Even in the well-studied case (1), this is a new observation that has ramifications for the use of constitutive laws at the contact line in the case of singular slip. For case (3) multiple traveling wave solutions are observed with the same contact angle.