1. Introduction
The impact of a liquid drop on a quiescent liquid bath has been widely studied
due to its visual appeal and its importance in both natural processes and industrial
applications (Schotland 1960; Jayaratne & Mason 1964; Ching, Golay & Johnson
1984; Hallett & Christensen 1984; Cai 1989; Prosperetti & Oguz 1993). While
relatively straightforward to study experimentally since the advent of the high-speed
video camera, drop impact remains a challenging problem to treat analytically or to
simulate numerically. We here consider relatively low-energy impacts, in which the
droplet may rebound cleanly from the surface after a collision in which both the
droplet and bath are only weakly distorted.
The dynamics of the drop impact depends in general on the drop inertia, surface
tension, viscous forces within the drop, bath and surrounding air, and gravity.
Restricting attention to the case of a drop’s normal impact on a quiescent bath
of the same liquid reduces the number of relevant physical variables to six:
the gravitational acceleration g, the droplet radius R0 and impact speed Vin, the
liquid density , dynamic viscosity and surface tension (see table 1). These
give rise to three dimensionless groups: the Weber number We D R0V2
in= , Bond
number Bo D gR20
= and Ohnesorge number Oh D .R0/