Contact Line Instabilities

DESCRIPTION AND AIM

The aim of this workshop is to bring together people from the highly ranked academia and industry on the subject of stability of contact line and its impact on industrial applications in order that they can share their latest knowledge and experience and open some paths for cracking many observed problems in the realm of interfacial phenomena at very small scales that are as yet not understood well.

Stability of contact line and the interface between liquid and gasses at micron and submicron scales has shown to be of utmost importance in the performance of many recent high tech electronic systems. Notably the development of next generation nano-lithography tools for innovations in Integrated Circuits and advancement in micro inkjet printing is disturbed by many undesired instability phenomena at or in the vicinity of contact line. Interfacial instabilities have been an intriguing part of the physical sciences for many years and the last three decades has seen considerable progress in theoretical, numerical and visualizing techniques for the analysis of fluid behavior at the interface of material phases.  However, many observed interfacial instability phenomena in industrial applications are not yet understood well and little satisfactory or robust solutions have been proposed. These phenomena comprise subjects such as 

entrapment of air and the formation of bubbles at very small scales formation of drops from thin fluid layers instabilities in drop formation at very small scales for inkjet printing surface tension gradient effects in formation and removal or drops effect of surface chemistry changes thermal gradient impact on instabilities effect of external fields (electro-magentic, acoustic, etc) on interfaces and bubbles

Understanding the source of these phenomena and having a solid grasp of them in many applications in order to control the mentioned undesired instabilities needs a clear boost by appropriate co-operation between relevant high tech industries and academia on this subject. ASML, Oce, as representative of advanced high tech Dutch industries and the three Dutch Technical Universities have recently started a strong co-operation on some of these subjects under the flagship of FOM-IPP. Extension and elaboration of this co-operation with participation of key note speakers and scientist from other internationally well-known academia will strengthen this program and will broaden the scope of solutions and addressed issues.

We intend to have an interactive workshop by presentation of latest results of research on related subjects and by including separate workshops to tackle certain problems in smaller groups and open plenary discussions. We expect that this will lead to new co-operations, finding new roads to control of contact line instabilities, and to new explanations of the effect of certain parameters on these instabilities leading to high level scientific publications.