Liquid film dewetting induced by impulsive Joule heating

Motivated by the need for understanding the boiling processes in three-phase microscopic systems, the present work aims to uncover the physics of forced dewetting of a liquid film initially attached to a metal wire frame, which is heated with a rate up to O(108) K s−1 by discharging a capacitor impulsively. Depending on the corresponding heat flux O(1011) J m−2, there are several key dewetting regimes—no detachment, nonuniform detachment, and uniform detachment of a film—differentiated by boiling transitions in the film Plateau borders. Transitions between these regimes prove to occur, for various wire diameters and frame sizes, around the same values of the capacitor energy per unit wire volume. Also, an intrinsic transverse instability manifesting itself in the formation of fingers along the detached liquid film rim is discovered and analyzed in detail.