Bouncing droplets, the role of deformations

Nowadays, innovative applications such as "lab-on-a-chip", micro-reactors or biological chips are developed for industry, biology or medicine. Capillary issues are encountered which are not yet fully understood. It is therefore essential to open up ways to manipulate tiny amounts of liquid in order to mix them, encapsulate them or to create emulsions. The bouncing droplets on an oscillating liquid interface allow their manipulation. Indeed, under certain conditions, droplets can bounce indefinitely on a bath surface as long as the squeezed air film which separates the drop from the bath is renewed at each bounce. We chose to study deformable droplets on a non-deformable bath. The droplets are deformable because they are large or made of a low viscous oil, the liquid of the bath being highly viscous silicone oil. We investigated how the deforma- tions, the stability and the trajectories of the droplets depends on the forcing parameters such as the frequency and the amplitude of the oscillation. We also studied the possibility of mixing and emulsifying droplets on the bath. Finally, we showed the effect of the deformation of the bath on these bouncing droplets and studied the trajectories of walking droplets [1] which are used as a model for quantum-like particles [2-5]. In this manuscript, we reported an exploration of the droplets behavior as a function of the ability of the bath and/or the droplet to deform.
Depending on the forcing frequency, specific deformation modes are excited on the bouncing droplets. We used these modes to rationalize their bouncing stability and to create double emulsions in a compound droplet. Then, we determined numerically the complex bifurcation diagrams of the trajectories of a bouncing droplet thanks to a model based on a spring. On a low viscous bath, we evidenced the importance of its deformation. We showed that a walker exists as soon as the droplet experiences, once every two oscillation periods, a jump high enough to trigger a Faraday wave. As a consequence, we have to take the bouncing droplets into account when looking for an alternative way to manipulate them or as a model of quantum-like particles. The bouncing droplets still exhibit lots of intriguing behaviors which have yet to be explained. They can therefore remain the focus of future works.