Professor James Sprittles - Droplets skating on gas nanofilms: merging, wetting, bouncing & levitation AbstractRecent advances in experimental techniques have enabled remarkable discoveries and insight into how the dynamics of thin gas/vapour films can profoundly influence the behaviour of liquid droplets: drops impacting solids can “skate on a film of air”, so that they can “bounce off walls”; reductions in ambient gas pressure can suppress splashing and initiate the merging of colliding droplets; and evaporating droplets can levitate on their own vapour film (the Leidenfrosteffect). Despite these advances, the precise physical mechanisms governing these phenomena remains a topic of debate. In this talk, I will overview our development of efficient computational models for the aforementioned droplet dynamics in the presence of gas nanofilms into which gas-kinetic, van der Waals and/or evaporative effects can be easily incorporated in order to address these open problems and stimulate new directions of research.BiographyJames Sprittles is Professor in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick. He has published 60 articles, including 18 in the Journal of FluidMechanics and 6 in Physical Review Letters; given invited talks/visits worldwide at leading institutions and the top international conferences. Sprittles is renowned for his expertise in the modelling and computation of technologically-relevant smallscale interfacial flows, particularly those with unconventional physics. This is evidenced by recent invitations to write two Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics articles on droplet dynamics, one of which has recently been published and is related to the topic of this talk (https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-fluid-121021-021121). Mar 06 2024 15.30 - 16.30 Professor James Sprittles - Droplets skating on gas nanofilms: merging, wetting, bouncing & levitation Edinburgh Fluid Dynamics Group welcomes Professor James Sprittles in an exciting new series of colloquia co-funded by the Schools of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy. Yew Lecture Theatre, Nucleus, King's Buildings This article was published on Wednesday 2 September 2026
Professor James Sprittles - Droplets skating on gas nanofilms: merging, wetting, bouncing & levitation AbstractRecent advances in experimental techniques have enabled remarkable discoveries and insight into how the dynamics of thin gas/vapour films can profoundly influence the behaviour of liquid droplets: drops impacting solids can “skate on a film of air”, so that they can “bounce off walls”; reductions in ambient gas pressure can suppress splashing and initiate the merging of colliding droplets; and evaporating droplets can levitate on their own vapour film (the Leidenfrosteffect). Despite these advances, the precise physical mechanisms governing these phenomena remains a topic of debate. In this talk, I will overview our development of efficient computational models for the aforementioned droplet dynamics in the presence of gas nanofilms into which gas-kinetic, van der Waals and/or evaporative effects can be easily incorporated in order to address these open problems and stimulate new directions of research.BiographyJames Sprittles is Professor in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick. He has published 60 articles, including 18 in the Journal of FluidMechanics and 6 in Physical Review Letters; given invited talks/visits worldwide at leading institutions and the top international conferences. Sprittles is renowned for his expertise in the modelling and computation of technologically-relevant smallscale interfacial flows, particularly those with unconventional physics. This is evidenced by recent invitations to write two Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics articles on droplet dynamics, one of which has recently been published and is related to the topic of this talk (https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-fluid-121021-021121). Mar 06 2024 15.30 - 16.30 Professor James Sprittles - Droplets skating on gas nanofilms: merging, wetting, bouncing & levitation Edinburgh Fluid Dynamics Group welcomes Professor James Sprittles in an exciting new series of colloquia co-funded by the Schools of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy. Yew Lecture Theatre, Nucleus, King's Buildings This article was published on Wednesday 2 September 2026
Mar 06 2024 15.30 - 16.30 Professor James Sprittles - Droplets skating on gas nanofilms: merging, wetting, bouncing & levitation Edinburgh Fluid Dynamics Group welcomes Professor James Sprittles in an exciting new series of colloquia co-funded by the Schools of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy.
