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Description

The subject of this talk is the electrostatic stabilization of a viscous thin liquid film wetting the underside of a horizontal surface in the presence of an electric field applied parallel to the undisturbed interface. The formulated asymptotic model includes the effect of bounding solid dielectric regions typically found in experiments above and below the fluids. The competition between gravitational forces, surface tension, and the non-local effect of the applied electric field is captured analytically in the form of a nonlinear evolution equation. State-of-the-art computational tools based on the volume-of-fluid method are also implemented to both assess the range of validity of the derived model and guide these arguments towards practical (and highly nonlinear) contexts involving mixing, pumping and directed polymer assembly. Joint work with T.G. Anderson (Caltech), D.T. Papageorgiou (Imperial College London) and P.G. Petropoulos (NJIT).