Simulation of slide-coating flows using a fixed grid and a volume-of- fluid front-tracking technique: Startup and bead breakup

Slide coating flow is a workhorse process for manufacturing precision film-coating products. Properly starting up a slide coating process is very important in reducing wastage during startup and ensuring that the process operates within the desired `coating window.` A two-phase flow analysis of slide-coating startup was performed by Palmquist and Scriven (1994) using Galerkin`s method with finite-element basis functions and an elliptic mesh generation scheme. As reported by Chen (1992) from flow visualization experiments, a continuously coated liquid film breaks up into rivulets, which are coating stripes with dry lanes in between, when the coated film becomes thinner and thinner due to either the increase in substrate speed or the reduction in pre-metered feed-liquid pump speed. It was observed that the coated-film breakup process originated from the coating bead, thus the name of bead breakup. Understanding the bead-breakup phenomena and elucidating mechanisms involved will provide guidance for manufacturing thinner coating, an industrial trend for better product performance. In this paper we present simulation results of slide-coating flows obtained from a computational method capable of describing arbitrary, three-dimensional and time-dependent deformations. The method, which is available in a commercial code, uses a fixed grid through which fluid interfaces are tracked by a Volume-of-Fluid technique (Hirt and Nichols, 1981). Surface tension, wall adhesion, and viscous stresses are fully accounted for in our analysis. We illustrate our computational approach by application to startup and the bead-breakup problems. As will be shown, for rapid processes our approach offers the computational efficiency and robustness that are difficult o achieve in conventional finite-element-based methods.