The Meniscus Instability of a Thin Liquid Film

Abstract

This paper reports on the instability for the meniscus of a thin film of a very viscous liquid between two tilted plates, which are separated at a constant speed with a tilt angle in the normal direction of the plates. The disturbances on the meniscus moving with movement of the plates are examined experimentally and theoretically. The disturbances are started when the velocity of movement of the plates exceeds a critical one. The wavelength of the disturbances is measured by using a VTR. The instability of the meniscus is studied theoretically using the linearized perturbation method. A simple and complete analytical solution yields both a stability criterion and the wave number for a linear thickness geometry. These results compared with experiments for the instability show the validity of the stability criterion and the best agreement is obtained with the wave number of maximum amplification.