Interfacial Phenomena in Droplets: Instabilities, Impact, Wetting and Drying
Droplets are where a great deal of interesting fluid mechanics happens, and the interface is where it is decided. How a drop breaks, how it lands, how far it spreads and what it leaves behind when it dries are all governed by what occurs over a few micrometres of interface, yet they set the performance of combustors and propulsion systems, inkjet and additive manufacturing, spray cooling, agricultural sprays, coatings, diagnostics and microfluidic devices. The last decade has brought high speed imaging, interface resolved simulation and engineered surfaces to the point where the underlying physics can finally be observed and predicted rather than inferred.This Special Topic brings together current work across four connected themes: droplet breakup and instabilities from hypersonic to microfluidic conditions, impact of droplets on natural and engineered surfaces, wetting and dewetting on functionalised, patterned and liquid infused surfaces, and drying and pattern formation in simple and complex droplets. Experimental, computational and theoretical contributions are equally welcome, as are Perspectives, Tutorials and Reviews. The collection is associated with the International Conference on Interfacial Phenomena in Droplets, to be held at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, on 5 to 7 October 2026, but submission is open to all and is not restricted to conference participants.
Topics covered include, but are not limited to:
- Droplet Breakup and Instabilities: Breakup under moderate to extreme conditions, including hypersonic and shock driven aerobreakup
- Atomization and sprays across spatiotemporal scales
- Droplet breakup in inkjet printing and additive manufacturing
- Droplet breakup and generation in microfluidics
- Breakup of complex and non-Newtonian droplets
- Wetting and Dewetting: Surface functionalization for controlled wetting
- Heterogeneous, patterned and gradient surfaces
- Liquid infused and slippery surfaces
- Contact line dynamics, hysteresis and dewetting instabilities
- Wetting on soft and deformable substrates
- Impact of Droplets onto Surfaces: Custom engineered and biomimetic surfaces
- Spray cooling, boiling and vaporization
- Agricultural sprays and impact on foliage
- Thermal spray and coating processes
- Impact on liquid films, pools and moving surfaces
- Droplet Drying and Pattern Formation: Drying physics of sessile and levitated droplets
- Drying of complex droplets: polymers, colloids, emulsions and bacterial suspensions
- Pattern formation, coffee ring and self-assembly in drying droplets
- Spray drying, surface patterning and diagnostic applications
- Respiratory and bioaerosol droplets
- Cross Cutting: Interface resolved simulation and reduced order modelling of droplet interfaces
- Advanced optical and laser diagnostics for droplet interfaces
- Machine learning approaches to droplet dynamics and interfacial flows
Guest Editors
Saptarshi Basu, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Aloke Kumar, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Ranjan Ganguly, Department of Power Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India