The Role of the Dynamic Contact Angle on Splashing

Abstract

In this letter we study the splashing behaviour of droplets upon impact onto a variety of substrates with different wetting properties, ranging from hydrophilic to super-hydrophobic surfaces. In particular, we study the effects of the dynamic contact angle on splashing. The experimental approach uses high-speed imaging and image analysis to recover the apparent contact angle as a function of the spreading speed. Our results show that neither the Capillary number nor the so-called splashing parameter are appropriate to characterise the splashing behaviour under these circumstances. However, we show that the maximum dynamic advancing contact angle and the splashing ratio β adequately characterise the splashing behaviour.