Drying defects tunable by periodic air blowing: A simple modeling

PMSE 79

Masato Yamamura, yamamura@che.kyutech.ac.jp, Tetsuro Uchinomiya, Yoshihide Mawatari, and Hiroyuki Kage. Department of Applied Chemistry, Kyushu Institute of Technology, 1-1, Sensui, Tobata, Kitakyushu, Japan
There has been much interest in creating microstructures in drying polymeric coatings. Typical examples include ordered phase separating morphologies, asymmetric porous layers, regular crack arrays, flow-induced surface textures and transparent, conductive particulate layers. However, these attempts have mainly focused on kinetics in liquid phase by simply assuming a quasi-steady gas phase condition. Here we report a simple class of microstructures that are tunable by periodic air blowing onto a gas/liquid interface. A switching between fast and slow air blowing allows concentration/temperature gradients in liquid to relax at a certain time scale, giving rise to inherently different structures that strongly depend on operating conditions. We built a simple diffusion model coupled with a transverse surface-tension-driven Marangoni flow to compute a transient behavior of drying-induced surface roughening of a volatile, Newtonian liquid layer. The results indicated that the periodic air blowing can level the coating surface under a properly chosen blowing condition.