The hydrodynamics of liquid flowing past gas sectors of unidirectional superhydrophobic surfaces is revisited. Attention is focused on the local slip boundary condition at the liquid-gas interface, which is equivalent to the effect of a gas cavity on liquid flow. The system is characterized by a large viscosity contrast between liquid and gas $\mu /{\mu }_g\gg 1$. We interpret earlier results, namely, the dependence of the local slip length on the flow direction, in terms of a tensorial local slip boundary condition and relate the eigenvalues of the local local slip tensor to the texture parameters, such as the width of the groove $\delta$ and the local depth of the groove $e(y,\alpha )$. The latter varies in the direction $y$, orthogonal to the orientation of stripes, and depends on the bevel angle of the groove's edges, $\pi /2-\alpha$, at the point where three phases meet. Our theory demonstrates that when grooves are sufficiently deep their eigenvalues of the local slip length tensor depend only on $\mu /{\mu }_g,\delta$, and $\alpha$, but not on the depth. The eigenvalues of the local slip length of shallow grooves depend on $\mu /{\mu }_g$ and $e(y,\alpha )$, although the contribution of the bevel angle is moderate. In order to assess the validity of our theory we propose an approach to solve the two-phase hydrodynamic problem, which significantly facilitates and accelerates calculations compared to conventional numerical schemes. The numerical results show that our simple analytical description obtained for limiting cases of deep and shallow grooves remains valid for various unidirectional textures.

• Received 26 July 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.3.014002