Viscous Dissipation, Helicity and Enstrophy of Bouncing Droplets undergoing Off-center Collision

Abstract: The off-center collision of binary bouncing droplets of equal size was studied numerically by a volume-of-fluid (VOF) method with two marker functions, which has been validated by comparing with available experimental results. A non-monotonic kinetic energy recovery with varying impact parameters was found based on the energy budget analysis. This can be explained by the prolonged entanglement time and the enhanced internal-flow-induced viscous dissipation for bouncing droplets at intermediate impact parameters, compared with those at smaller or larger impact parameters. The universality of this non-monotonicity was numerically verified, and thereby an approximate fitting formula was proposed to correlate the kinetic energy dissipation factor with the impact parameter for various Weber numbers and Ohnesorge numbers. From the vortex dynamics perspective, a helicity analysis of droplet internal flow identifies a strong three-dimensional interaction between the "ring-shaped" vortices and the "line-shaped" shear layers for off-center collisions. Furthermore, we demonstrated theoretically and verified numerically that the equivalence between the total enstrophy and the total viscous dissipation, which holds for a single-phase flow system confined by stationary boundaries, is not generally satisfied for the two-phase flow system containing gas-liquid interfaces. This is attributed to the work done by the unbalanced viscous stresses, which results from the interfacial flow and the vorticity associated with the movement of the oscillating interface.