Abstract
Although the motion of the three-phase contact line on a solid substrate has been extensively studied thus far, the understanding of the dynamics of the contact line of liquid/liquid/gas phases is far from complete. Here we deposit a drop of isopropyl alcohol (IPA) on water and HFE-7100 whose free surfaces are exposed to air to observe the flow field around the contact line. By combining the shadowgraph and high-speed imaging techniques, we find that vortices are spontaneously generated at the contact line, which grow in size with time. The flow is attributed to the Marangoni stress that pulls a liquid of lower-surface tension toward a liquid surface having a higher surface tension. However, it is not still clear why the entrained lower-surface-tension liquid should whirl rapidly beneath the contact line. We also visualize the flow by the particle image velocimetry (PIV) to find out that the rotational velocity reaches the order of 1 mm/s near the free surface.
