The maximum spreading of drops impacting on smooth and rough surfaces is measured from low to high impact velocity for liquids with different surface tensions and viscosities. We demonstrate that dynamic wetting plays an important role in the spreading at low velocity, characterized by the dynamic contact angle at maximum spreading. In the energy balance, we account for the dynamic wettability by introducing the capillary energy at zero impact velocity, which relates to the spreading ratio at zero impact velocity. Correcting the measured spreading ratio by the spreading ratio at zero velocity, we find a correct scaling behaviour for low and high impact velocity and, by interpolation between the two, we find a universal scaling curve. The influence of the liquid as well as the nature and roughness of the surface are taken into account properly by rescaling with the spreading ratio at zero velocity, which, as demonstrated, is equivalent to accounting for the dynamic contact angle.

For a two phase incompressible flow we consider a diffuse interface model aimed at addressing the movement of three-phase (fluid-fluid-solid) contact lines. The model consists of the Cahn Hilliard Navier Stokes system with a variant of the Navier slip boundary conditions. We show that this model possesses a natural energy law. For this system, a new numerical technique based on operator splitting and fractional time-stepping is proposed. The method is shown to be unconditionally stable. We present several numerical illustrations of this scheme.

The shape and velocity of a sliding droplet are computed by solving the Navier-Stokes equation with free interface boundary conditions. The Galerkin finite element methodis implemented in a 2D computation domain discretized using an unstructured mesh withtriangular elements. The mesh is refined recursively at the corners (contact points). Thestationary sliding velocity is found to be strongly dependent on grid refinement, which isa consequence of the contact line singularity resolved through the effective slip across thefinite elements adjacent to the contact point. For small droplets, this dependence is wellapproximated by a theoretical estimates obtained using multiscale expansion and matchingtechnique in lubrication approximation, where the corner element size is used as a microscaleparameter. For larger droplets, the shape is also dependent on grid refinement. This questions the validity of numerous computations of flows with moving contact line where gridsare invariably much more coarse than molecular scales on which the singularity is resolved. Itis suggested that extrapolation to molecular scales should be used to obtain realistic results.