Abstract
The linear stability analysis of a fluid flow down a slippery inclined plane is carried out when the free surface of the fluid is contaminated by a monolayer of insoluble surfactant. The aim is to extend the earlier study [Samanta et al., J. Fluid Mech. 684, 353 (2011)] for low to high values of the Reynolds number in the presence of an insoluble surfactant. The Orr-Sommerfeld equation (OSE) is derived for infinitesimal disturbances of arbitrary wave numbers. At low Reynolds number, the OSE is solved analytically by using the long-wave analysis, which shows that the critical Reynolds number decreases in the presence of a slippery plane but increases in the presence of an insoluble surfactant. This fact ensures a destabilizing effect of wall slip and a stabilizing effect of insoluble surfactant on the long-wave surface mode. Further, the Chebyshev spectral collocation method is implemented to tackle the OSE equation numerically for an arbitrary value of the Reynolds number, or equivalently, for an arbitrary value of the wave number. At moderate Reynolds number, wall slip exhibits a stabilizing effect on the surface mode as opposed to the result in the long-wave regime, while the insoluble surfactant exhibits a stabilizing effect on the surface mode as in the result of the long-wave regime. On the other hand, at high Reynolds number, both wall slip and insoluble surfactant exhibit a stabilizing effect on the shear mode. Further, it is shown that both surface and shear modes compete with each other to dominate the primary instability once the inclination angle is sufficiently small. In addition, new phase boundaries are identified to differentiate the regimes of surface and shear modes.
9 More- Received 16 March 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.98.033108
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