Marangoni-driven liquid films rising out of a meniscus onto a nearly-horizontal substrate

Abstract We revisit the situation of a thin liquid film driven up an inclined substrate by a thermally induced Marangoni shear stress against the opposing parallel component of gravity. In contrast to previous studies, we focus here on the meniscus region, in a case where the substrate is nearly horizontal. Our numerical simulations show that the time-dependent lubrication model for the film profile can reach a steady state in the meniscus region that is unlike the monotonic solutions found in [A. Munch, The thickness of a Marangoni-driven thin liquid film emerging from a meniscus, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 62 (6) (2002) 2045–2063]. A systematic investigation of the steady states of the lubrication model is carried out by studying the phase space of the corresponding third-order ODE system. We find a rich structure of the phase space including multiple non-monotonic solutions with the same far-field film thickness.