Wave patterns in thin film flows

The application of a systematic strategy to the problem of falling liquid films is shown to lead to systems of equations of reduced dimensionality that capture the physical mechanisms quite faithfully, helping us to enlighten the observed dynamics by isolating the important physical effects. Additionally, a regularization procedure applied in the approach pushes away the validity range of a consistent three-field modeling of film flows in parameter space by reducing the degrees of the dangerous nonlinear terms. Having at one’s disposal reliable low-dimension models, one is able to undergo a systematic numerical analysis at low cost (in terms of CPU time). Consequently, complex wave patterns such as herringbone patterns, synchronously deformed fronts, V-shape solitary waves observed in various experimental data can be recovered. In this paper, we specifically compare our model to recent and well-controlled experiments by Park & Nosoko [AIChE J., 49, 2715 (2003)].