Experimental Study of the Dynamics of Coating Flow on Fiber Array

The present paper investigated the dynamics of coating flow on array of cylindrical fibres. In the experiments, it is observed that there exist three distinct flow regimes when the fiber array is fully coated by liquid film, namely, regime ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’. The flow regime ‘a’ is characterized by the formation of a streamwise uniform film; The flow regime ‘b’ and ‘c’ are in the form of traveling waves consisting of asymmetrical wavy structures and symmetrical beads, respectively. We conducted a comprehensive parametric study on the dynamics of the coating flow on fiber array, including the flow rate, fiber spacing and droplet amplitude, all of which serve as reliable indicators of different flow regimes.