A unified numerical model for wetting of soft substrates

The wetting of deformable elastic structures has been recently shown to comprise a rich variety of new physical phenomena (stick-slip motion, durotaxis, Shuttleworth effect, etc.) whose fundamental understanding demands for numerical simulation tools. In this article, we develop a novel unified model and numerical method for this problem. As special features, the method includes exact incompressibility and a linear monolithic assembly of the Navier-Stokes and Cahn-Hilliard equations which stabilizes dominant surface tension at small interface lengths. Also, solid viscosity is included which offers the opportunity to simulate the surfing behavior of droplets on viscoelastic substrates for the first time. We show that the method is highly accurate and more robust than most previous approaches and illustrate its potential by numerical simulation examples.

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