The effects of surfactant solubility on inertial Marangoni flow: theory and numerics

Abstract: Surface active agents (surfactants) are common contaminants found on most air-liquid interfaces. Surfactants lower the surface tension, and hence surfactant concentration gradients generate surface tension gradients, which leads to flow. A canonical surfactant-induced flow is the outward spreading due to the localised deposition of surfactants onto an otherwise clean liquid interface. Eshima et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., accepted, 2026) demonstrated experimentally and theoretically, through a late-time similarity solution, that surfactant solubility enhances surfactant-induced flows of air-liquid-air sheets and that soluble surfactant solutions can be mapped onto equivalent insoluble surfactant solutions. Here we extend the work theoretically and numerically, developing a systematic framework for the derivation and analysis of such solutions. The relevant nondimensional parameters are quantitatively defined, and the physically accessible parameter space is wide, which our theory and numerical simulations are able to span. We link the solutions for finitely soluble surfactants to the solutions for the limiting regimes of insoluble and infinitely soluble surfactants, where the latter link only holds transiently: the solution of the infinitely soluble limit appears as an intermediate solution that persists ever longer as solubility increases, before the ultimate late-time solution, which maps onto insoluble surfactants, is obtained.