Vortices in lm ow over strongly undulated bottom proles

at low Reynolds numbers

A. Wierschem, M. Scholle, and N. Aksel
a)
LS Technische Mechanik und Stromungsmechanik, Universitat Bayreuth, D-95440 Bayreuth, Germany
Received 15 August 2002; accepted 24 October 2002; published 8 January 2003
We present an experimental study of gravity driven lms owing down sinusoidal bottom proles
of high waviness. We nd vortices in the valleys of the undulated bottom prole. They are observed
at low Reynolds numbers down to the order of 10
5
. The vortices are visualized employing a
particle image velocimeter with uorescent tracers. It turns out that the vortices are generated
beyond a critical lm thickness. Their size tends to a nite value for thick lms. The critical lm
thickness depends on the waviness of the bottom undulation, the inclination angle, and on the
surface tension but not on the Reynolds number. Increasing the waviness, a second vortex can be
generated. 2003 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.1533075
I. INTRODUCTION
Gravity-driven lm ow is one of the most studied and
best understood systems in hydrodynamics. Although the in-
uence of imperfections in the topography of the bottom
strongly affect the ow of thin lms at low Reynolds num-
bers, almost the entire research has been focused on the lm
ow down a at incline. The impact of single small local
imperfections on the ow of thin liquid lms down an in-
clined plane has been studied numerically by Pozrikidis and
Thoroddsen.
1
Experiments on gravity-driven ow have been
carried out by Decre

et al. considering a topography of

steps.
2
These studies, however, focus only on the shape of
the free liquid surface induced by steep steps or by small
discrete particles.
The effects of sinusoidal bottom-prole variations on the
lm of a liquid owing down an incline has been studied
analytically and experimentally only for the case of rather
small waviness. Wang has considered the effect of weakly
undulated bottoms of thick lms
3
and that of more pro-
nounced waviness on thin lms
4
in his perturbation analyses.
He suggested that return ow may occur due to surface-
tension effects. However, Wierschem et al. showed that this
is beyond the valid range of the perturbation analyses.
5
Fur-
thermore, they have studied the regime of moderate and
small waviness experimentally and could not nd any vorti-
ces in this regime. A numerical study of the inuence of wall
corrugations on lm ow at rather high Reynolds numbers
has been carried out by Bontozoglou
6
and by Bontozoglou
and Papapolymerou.
7
They found that in a certain range of
Reynolds numbers capillary-gravity waves could be excited
by resonant interaction with the bottom undulation. They
also reported the observation of inertia-driven vortices in the
trough of the bottom undulations and found that these vorti-
ces may be suppressed by the resonant excitation of surface
wavesa fact also observed by Trifonov
8
in his calculations
at high Reynolds numbers.
An extensive numerical study of the inuence of wavy
bottom proles on creeping lm ow has been carried out by
Pozrikidis.
9
He found good agreement comparing his results
to those obtained analytically by Wang in the range of their
validity. Varying the ow rate, inclination angle, wave am-
plitude, and surface tension, he also studied situations that
are beyond the scope of Wangs analyses. He showed that
surface-tension effects may alter the ow considerably. For
proles of large waviness, he observed return ow solutions
if the lm is thick or at low inclination angles. However,
there are no experimental data on the occurrence of vortices
in lm ow over sinusoidal bottom proles.
Vortices have been found experimentally under creeping
ow conditions by Taneda.
10
He visualized the ow in dif-
ferent geometries, such as arcs, steps, and corners and could
recover most of the theoretical results on vortices in creeping
ows.
1113
Different from Tanedas systems, the gravity-
driven lm ow over sinusoidal bottoms studied here has a
free surface and thus besides the waviness it has further char-
acteristic length scales that yield critical values for the gen-
eration of vortices. Vortices in free lm ow along vertical
corrugated surfaces have been reported by Zhao and Cerro.
14
They studied experimentally the free surface shape and visu-
alized the streamlines in the lm. For periodic convex half
cycles they observed vortices no matter the thickness of the
lm was. For triangle and concave half cycles they stated
that they found ow separation only at the highest Reynolds
numbers and Capillary numbers studied. While the afore-
mentioned vortices appear at the lee side of the corrugations
or in the troughs, Negny et al. observed vortices at the at-
test part of the bottom undulation at rather high Reynolds
numbers.
15
Here, we report on vortices observed in gravity-driven
lm ow over sinusoidal bottom proles. The vortices occur
in the valleys of the undulated bottom prole even under
creeping ow conditions beyond a critical lm thickness.
The latter depends on the waviness of the bottom undulation,
a
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Telephone:
49-921-55-72 60; fax: 49-921-55-72 65; electronic mail:
tms@uni-bayreuth.de
PHYSICS OF FLUIDS VOLUME 15, NUMBER 2 FEBRUARY 2003
426 1070-6631/2003/15(2)/426/10/$20.00 2003 American Institute of Physics
the inclination angle, and is modied by surface-tension ef-
fects. Increasing the waviness, a second vortex can be gen-
erated. In Sec. II we describe the experimental system and
the applied methods. The experimental results on the vortices
are given in Sec. III and are discussed in Sec. IV. Finally, our
conclusions are summarized in Sec. V.
II. EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEM AND SETUPS
A. Experimental system
We have used a channel with sinusoidal bottom proles
of different waviness. The channel is built from an aluminum
bottom and transparent Plexiglas side-walls. It is divided into
different sections: A at one and another one with different
bottom proles. The latter ones are characterized by their
amplitude and wavelength. The parameters of the bottom
waves are given in Table I. The crests of the bottom waves
are all at the same level to minimize surface-tension effects
at the borders of the different sections. The measurements
are performed in the center of each of the sections, which are
large enough to assure that the measurements are not affected
by neighboring regions. The at section serves to compare
the ow over the wavy prole to that over a at bottom. The
channel has a width of 1701 mm. The setup with all undu-
lations except that with 1 mm amplitude and 5 mm wave-
length is shown in Fig. 1.
To minimize the Reynolds number, we chose a highly
viscous silicone oil, BC5000cs silicon oil from Basildon
Chemicals. Its viscosity, density, and surface tension were
measured in the temperature interval ranging from 291.15
303.15 K. At 295.15 K, it has a density of 0.972 g/cm
3
, a
kinematic viscosity of 5780 mm
2
/s, and a surface tension of
21.4 mN/m. The experimental runs are carried out at ambient
temperatures between 293.15 and 297.15 K resulting in a
deviation of density, viscosity, and surface tension from their
mean values of less than 0.2%, 4%, and 0.5%, respectively.
To study the impact of the Reynolds number we carried out
additional experiments using the silicon oil B1000 from Elbe
Silikone. This offers the advantage to change the Reynolds
number without hardly changing surface tension. Its viscos-
ity, density, and surface tension were measured in the tem-
perature interval ranging from 295.15 K299.15 K. The ex-
periments on the vortices were carried out in a temperature
interval between 297.55 and 297.95 K, where it has a density
of 0.969 g/cm
3
, a kinematic viscosity of 1213 mm
2
/s, and a
surface tension of 20.4 mN/m.
B. Experimental methods
The vortices are visualized at the centerline of the chan-
nel with a particle image velocimeter PIV from Dantec
Dynamics using uorescent tracer particles. It is made up of
a double pulse laser system, light sheet optics, a HiSense
camera with a 2.8/105 mm Nikon objective and a red lter
transmitting wavelengths larger than 550 nm, a PIV 1500
data acquisition unit, and FLOWMANAGER software for evalu-
ation. The laser system is made of two frequency doubled
Nd:YAG laser, working at 532 nm wavelength, with a pulse
energy of 30 mJ each. Part of the system is shown in Fig. 1.
For small time intervals, the PIV system can be used in the
double image mode and for large time intervals it is operated
in the single image mode, acquiring single images at xed
time steps. The latter is mainly applied in this study, because
of the slow motion of the ow and the spatial resolution
required. The images captured are evaluated with the FLOW-
MANAGER software to determine velocity elds or they are
superposed with the image processing software Optimas
from Media Cybernetics. From a sequence of images, the
maximum brightness at each pixel is determined to obtain
the particle positions during irradiation. If the tracer velocity
is so small, that the tracer moves less than its diameter dur-
ing the time interval between two successive images, this
yields the pathlines. If the tracer velocity is larger, the tracers
look like beads on a string from which the pathlines can be
reconstructed.
Since we are interested in the ow close to the bottom, it
is essential to use uorescent particles as tracers. The study
has been performed with dry red uorescent polystyrene mi-
crospheres from Duke Scientic with a mean diameter of 5
m. They have a density of 1.05 g/cm
3
. Due to the small
density difference of the particles to the silicone oils and due
to the high viscosity of the latter the sedimentation of the
tracers is of the order of 10
6
mm/s10
7
mm/s, depending
on the silicon oil used.
16
This is still sufciently smaller than
the smallest velocities detected, which are down to about
TABLE I. Parameters of the bottom waves.
Wavelength mm Amplitude mm Number of valleys
7.5 1 10
7 1 10
14 2 5
18 3 5
5 1 39
20 4 5
20 8 5
20 9 5
20 10 5
FIG. 1. View of the experimental system and setup. Left from the channel
with different undulated bottom proles are the PIV camera and the CCD
camera with the microscope objective used to scan the bottom proles and
the free surface. In the upper right is the neon lamp with the frosted-glass
cover.
427 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Vortices in lm ow
10
4
mm/s. To prevent the tracer particles from agglomera-
tion, they have been dispersed in small quantities of silicone
oil with a ULTRA TURRAX T50-disperser from IKA-
Werke.
Besides the vortices, we have also measured the position
of the free liquid surface. The surface position of the lm
owing over the at part of the channel and thus the lm
thickness is measured with a micrometer screw. This lm
thickness serves as a reference for the ows over the differ-
ent bottom waves. It has the advantage over volume-ux
detection that side-wall effects do not enter in its measure-
ment. When we refer to a lm thickness in this article we
always mean the thickness over the corresponding at in-
cline unless otherwise specied. The Reynolds number, Re,
is also dened for the corresponding lm ow over a at
incline: ReUh/(gh
3
sin )/(2
2
), where U and h are
surface velocity and lm thickness over a at incline, respec-
tively, is the mean inclination angle, the kinematic vis-
cosity, and g the acceleration of gravity.
The surface position over the undulated bottom has been
determined from the ow visualization images as shown in
Fig. 2. In this images, the surface appears as a bright line.
Small surface undulation have been measured by scanning
the meniscus from the side with a CV-M300 C/E CCD cam-
era from JAI mounted with a Zoom 70 microscope objective
from Opto Sonderbedarf GmbH. The camera is xed to an
XYZ-transverse unit and scans the meniscus against the
light. As light source we used a neon lamp with a frosted-
glass cover placed at a distance between 400 to 700 mm
from the channel. The setup is shown in Fig. 1. Further de-
tails on this method can be found in Ref. 5. Finally, the mean
transport velocity at the surface, as averaged over many
waves, has been measured by particle tracking of carbon
powder strewn on the liquid surface with a CCD camera
from above.
III. EXPERIMENTS
We rst report our results on single vortices. Unless oth-
erwise stated, they have been carried out with the silicon oil
BC5000cs. After some qualitative features, we cover the ef-
fects of the Reynolds number, lm thickness, inclination
angle, and surface tension for a bottom undulation of given
waviness, i.e., the ratio of wave amplitude to wavelength.
Then, we show the inuence of the waviness and report on
our observations of a second vortex. After some qualitative
features on the sensitivity of the vortices to perturbations we
nish with the effect of the vortices on the transport ow
velocity.
A series of images of the lm ow over a sinusoidal
bottom of 5 mm wavelength and 1 mm amplitude is shown
in Fig. 2. While there is no vortex observable in Fig. 2a, a
slight increase of the lm thickness results in a small vortex
in the trough of the bottom undulation as seen in Fig. 2b.
This vortex is about 100 m thick. Increasing the lm thick-
ness further leads to a much larger vortex as shown in Fig.
2c. Remarkably the separatrix seems to be a straight line at
mean inclination angle. A quantitative measure of the vortex
size as a function of the lm thickness is given in Fig. 3a.
It shows the distance of the vortex core and of the separatrix
FIG. 2. Film ow as visualized by determining the
maximum brightness at each pixel out of a series of
tracer images. The main ow direction is from the up-
per left to the lower right. The undulated bottom is at
the lower left, the lm itself is seen as a ecked area,
and its free surface as a thin bright line. Images of
tracers above this line are due to reections of the emit-
ted light at the free surface. In image a, no vortex can
be observed. Image b depicts a small vortex of about
100 m thickness in the trough of the undulation and
c shows a large eddy for a thick lm. Bottom wave-
length: 5 mm, amplitude: 1 mm, inclination angle: 45.
Film thickness: 1.6 mm a, 1.8 mm b, and 12 mm c.
428 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Wierschem, Scholle, and Aksel
to the center of the trough. Both distances show the same
qualitative behavior. Up to a critical lm thickness, there is
no vortex in the ow. Beyond this critical lm thickness the
size of the vortex increases sharply with the lm thickness
and tends to an asymptotic value for thick lms. Although
the Reynolds number differs strongly for the two silicon oils,
we obtain the same curves for both oils, as shown in Fig.
3a. For the BC5000cs silicon oil, the Reynolds number at
the critical lm thickness is 510
4
and reaches about 0.2
for the highest value shown in the diagram, while for the
B1000 silicon oil, we arrive at a Reynolds number of 1.1
10
2
for the critical lm thickness and reach for the highest
value shown a Reynolds number of 1.2. Thus, although the
Reynolds number changes about one to two orders in mag-
nitude, we do not see any impact on the vortices.
Figure 3b shows the peakpeak amplitude of the free
upper surface as measured for the BC5000cs silicon oil. Be-
yond a peakpeak amplitude relative to the amplitude of the
bottom wave of about 0.3 the data can be tted properly to
an exponential decay and the surface shape seems to be sinu-
soidal. For thinner lms, however, the surface amplitude de-
viates from this t to smaller values. This is due to restric-
tions resulting from the mean inclination angle and from the
surface tension. Since the bottom contour is not monoto-
nously falling, thin lms build puddles at the upward point-
ing side of the undulation, resulting in an almost horizontal
surface in this part of the undulation. The amplitude is fur-
ther decreased by surface tension that attens sharp corners.
Under these circumstances, the surface shape is not sinu-
soidal anymore. An example observed in our experiments is
depicted in Fig. 11a. For the case shown in Fig. 3, we
remark that the critical lm thickness for the vortex genera-
tion is in the regime where the surface amplitude falls off
exponentially.
A typical velocity eld of the vortex is shown in Fig.
4a. To focus on the low velocity of the vortex, the overlay-
ing ow eld is not resolved. Fig. 4b depicts the maximum
return velocity in the vortex as a function of the lm thick-
ness together with an exponential t to the data. It is scaled
with a reference velocity U
Ref
(g
2
sin )/(2), where is
the mean inclination angle, is the wavelength of the bottom
contour, the kinematic viscosity, and g the acceleration of
gravity. The diagram depicts velocities that range from less
than 1 to about 60 m/s.
The dependence of the critical lm thickness on the in-
clination angle is shown in Fig. 5 for the case of small
surface-tension effects. For small inclination angles, the criti-
cal lm thickness increases strongly with the inclination
angle while it changes rather weakly at angles beyond 20.
The data can be tted properly with a cotangent function as
shown in the diagram. Surface-tension effects are described
in nondimensional variables by the Bond number
FIG. 3. Vortex size as a function of the lm thickness a, and peakpeak amplitude of the free surface for the silicon oil BC5000cs b. In a, the distance
of the vortex core and of the separatrix to the center of the trough are shown as circles and squares, respectively. Measurements with the oils BC5000cs and
B1000 are depicted as solid and open symbols, respectively. The Reynolds numbers at the onset of the vortices are 510
4
and 1.410
2
, respectively. The
curves are ts to the experimental data with the Weibull function. The thick curve in b is an exponential t to the data for thick lms of the BC5000cs oil.
Bottom wavelength: 5 mm, amplitude: 1 mm, inclination angle: 45.
FIG. 4. Velocity eld of a vortex in the trough of the bottom a and the
maximum return velocity in the vortex as a function of the lm thickness
together with an exponential t to the data b. The velocities are scaled with
a reference velocity that corresponds to the surface velocity of a at lm
with a thickness of the wavelength. Bottom wavelength: 5 mm, amplitude: 1
mm, inclination angle: 9.8. Film thickness in a: 7.13 mm.
429 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Vortices in lm ow
BoBo* sin

2l
Ca

2
sin 1
where is the mean inclination angle, and is the wave-
length of the bottom contour. The capillary length is dened
as l
Ca
/(g), with the surface tension , the liquid den-
sity , and the acceleration of gravity g. We have seen that
the inclination angle changes the critical lm thickness. Thus
to check the inuence of surface tension on the vortices
alone for a given waviness without changing the liquid, we
x the inclination angle and vary the absolute scale of the
bottom undulation. To this end we have studied the case of
small and large Bond numbers at the waviness 0.2 for a
wavelength of 20 and 5 mm at two different inclination
angles. The results are shown in Fig. 6. Comparing the data
for a given inclination angle, Fig. 6a shows that the non-
dimensional critical lm thickness is larger for higher Bond
number. At an inclination angle of 45 the difference is rather
small; however, at an angle of 9.8 the gap has widened
considerably. On the other hand, comparing the data for dif-
ferent angles, we see that although the Bond number for the
20 mm waves at 9.8 is larger than that for 5 mm waves at
45, its nondimensional critical lm thickness is not. With
increasing lm thickness the difference in the nondimen-
sional vortex size diminishes so that for thick lms it be-
comes independent of the Bond number as well as from the
inclination angle. We further remark that the Reynolds num-
ber is largest for the case of high Bond number. For the
values shown in the graph, the Reynolds numbers range from
about 510
2
to about 0.2. The surface amplitude for the
different cases is shown in Fig. 6b. The surface amplitudes
apparently decrease exponentially for thick lms. For thin
lms, they cannot be described with an exponential law. Es-
pecially the amplitude for the lowest Bond-number case
studied seems to reach a plateau at a peakpeak amplitude of
about 90 m. Comparing the data for a given inclination
angle, the amplitude for high Bond numbers is higher than
that for the small Bond number for thin lms; however, this
is not the case when comparing different angles.
Up to now we have studied the vortices for a xed wavi-
ness by varying the lm thickness, the inclination angle, and
FIG. 7. Vortex with bent separatrix in the trough of a bottom wave as
visualized by adding up series of tracer images. The main ow direction is
from left to right. Bottom wavelength: 20 mm, amplitude: 9 mm, inclination
angle: 45. Film thickness: 5.3 mm.
FIG. 5. Critical lm thickness for the generation of a vortex as a function of
the inclination angle. The solid squares mark the minimum lm thickness
where the vortex has been observed and the open squares indicate the maxi-
mum lm thickness with no vortex observed. The curve is a t to the data of
the form: H
cr
H
0
(cot
0
cot ), with H
cr
, H
0
, and a
0
being the critical
lm thickness, and two t parameters. Bottom wavelength: 20 mm, ampli-
tude: 4 mm.
FIG. 6. Inuence of the Bond number on the vortex for given waviness. Distance of the separatrix to the center of the trough as a function of the lm thickness
a and peakpeak amplitude of the free surface b. The circles correspond to a wavelength of 5 mm, and the squares to a wavelength of 20 mm. The open
and solid symbols indicate the data for 9.8 and 45 inclination angle, respectively. Waviness: 0.2, Bond numbers: : 3.18; : 0.77; : 0.20; : 0.05.
430 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Wierschem, Scholle, and Aksel
the absolute scale of the bottom wave to account for the
effect of surface tension. We now study the vortices for dif-
ferent waviness. First of all, we observe that for stronger
waviness the separatrix is not a straight line but is bent.
Figure 7 shows an example for the waviness 0.45. Second,
we detected the critical lm thickness for the vortex as a
function of the waviness. The results are given in Fig. 8
together with a logarithmic t to the data. At the inclination
angle of 45 considered here, the inuence of surface tension
is rather weak as shown in Fig. 6a. We see that the critical
lm thickness increases strongly with decreasing waviness.
For the higher wavy bottoms we could not nd a lm with-
out a vortex at the given inclination angle. Although we de-
creased the lm thickness down to less than 0.7 mm, corre-
sponding to about 1/30 of the wavelength.
In the cases of highly undulated bottoms, we found a
second vortex for sufciently thick lms. An example is
shown in Fig. 9. Like for the rst vortex, their critical lm
thickness decreases with increasing waviness. Figure 10
shows an example of the vortex size and the surface defor-
mation for very high waviness. Concerning the second vor-
tex, we see that it forms again beyond a critical lm thick-
ness and grows with the lm thickness. The velocities in the
second vortex are much smaller than that of the rst vortex.
For a lm thickness of about 0.47 times the wavelength, the
ratio of the velocities along the separatrices is about 3000:1
and it reduces to about 1250:1 for a lm thickness to wave-
length ratio of 0.62. In the region of thick lms, where the
second vortex is observed, the rst vortex shows the same
qualitative behavior as observed before for smaller waviness
in Fig. 3a, i.e., the growth of the vortex diminishes with the
lm thickness. However, for thinner lms the diminution of
the vortex lessens and the size seems to tend to a constant
value for zero lm thickness. For the thinnest lms the po-
sition of the vortex core moves slightly to the steep side of
the bottom contour. The surface amplitude of the thin lms
deviates from the exponential behavior and the surface shape
strongly differs from the sinusoidal form. The latter can be
seen in Fig. 11a. The lm is so thin that its free surface
invades the wavy region. At the falling edge of the bottom
the lm is bent backwards. Here the lm is extremely thin
and almost parallel to the bottom. The rising edge restricts
the level of the lm, since the lms free surface must be
monotonously falling. So in this region, the free surface de-
creases only slightly in ow direction. Thus, the rising edge
enforces a lower limit for the local lm thickness over the
trough. Only by increasing the inclination angle this limit
can be lowered. For the waviness of 0.45 studied here we
observed a ow without vortices at an inclination angle of
80 as shown in Fig. 11b.
We found that small vortices over highly undulated bot-
toms are sensitive to small perturbations. Perturbing the ow
by slight inclinations along the channel width or by a small
pulsation of the ow may deform the vortex into a spiral. An
example of a single vortex is given in Fig. 12a. Figures
12b and 12c show the second vortex. It can even be dis-
placed to the side as seen from Fig. 12c. We notice that in
this case the rst vortex is hardly affected by the perturba-
tion.
The ow separation due to the vortex modies the
boundary condition of the overlying ow downstream in the
sense that there is no no-slip condition for the downstream
ow along the separatrix. This may modify the overall trans-
port velocity of the ow. To clarify the inuence of the vor-
tices on the transport velocity, we measured the mean trans-
port velocity at the lms free surface over 1530 waves and
compared them to the theoretical lm surface velocity over a
corresponding at plate at same inclination angle, thus, for
the same volume ux. The result is shown in Fig. 13. We
remark that in this case there exists a vortex even for the
thinnest lms. For thin lms the transport velocity over the
wavy bottom is considerably smaller than that over a at
incline. With increasing lm thickness the difference tends to
zero. In a certain parameter range, we measured a ratio
slightly larger than one. However, the ratio one is still within
the experimental uncertainty of the data. Finally, for thick
lms, the ratio between the two velocities is about one.
FIG. 9. Film ow with two vortices in the trough of a
bottom wave as visualized by adding up series of tracer
images. The main ow direction is from the upper left
to the lower right. a shows the ow over one bottom
wave, and b is an amplication focusing on the sec-
ond vortex. Bottom wavelength: 20 mm, amplitude: 9
mm, inclination angle: 45, lm thickness: 11.6 mm.
FIG. 8. Critical lm thickness as a function of the waviness. The squares
indicate the critical thickness of the rst vortex and the circles that of the
second vortex. Solid and open symbols refer to the thickness where a vortex
is observed or not observed, respectively. The curves are logarithmic ts to
the data H
cr
/H
0
/B ln(A/A
0
/), with H
0
, B, and A
0
being t pa-
rameters. Inclination angle: 45.
431 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Vortices in lm ow
IV. DISCUSSION
A. Discussion of the experimental observations
For strongly undulated bottoms, the vortices are gener-
ated beyond a critical lm thickness. We have observed these
vortices for small Reynolds numbers, however, covering sev-
eral orders of magnitude ranging from about 310
5
to
about 1.2. In this range, the Reynolds number apparently is
not responsible for the existence of the vortices. As shown in
Fig. 3a, the vortex takes the same size for the same lm
thickness irrespective of the Reynolds number, which varies
about one to two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, if the
Reynolds number were important for the generation of the
vortices, the critical lm thickness for the generation of a
vortex would be a function of the Reynolds number and
would diminish for increasing Reynolds numbers. However,
as shows Fig. 5, the critical lm thickness increases with the
inclination angle and so does the Reynolds number. Even
more striking is the fact that the critical lm thickness is
higher for larger absolute sizes, as shown in Fig. 6a, and
thus for higher Reynolds number. The Reynolds numbers for
20 mm bottom waves at the critical lm thickness is 5
10
3
and 4.510
2
for 9.8 and 45 inclination angle, re-
spectively. This is about two orders of magnitude higher than
the lowest Reynolds numbers at which we have observed
vortices over 5 mm bottom waves. Furthermore, inertia-
driven ow separation usually takes place at the lee side of a
ow. The vortices here, however, are generated in the very
trough of the bottom wave. We suppose that the reason for
the apparent independence of the vortices from the Reynolds
number lies in the fact that the velocities in the bottom
trough are even much smaller than at the free surface and
consequently as shown in Fig. 13 the mean free surface ve-
locity is about the same as that of a lm owing over a at
incline for the same volume ux. The maximum return ve-
FIG. 10. Vortex size as a function of the lm thickness a and peakpeak amplitude of the free surface b. In a, the distance of the vortex core and of the
separatrix to the center of the trough are shown as open and solid squares, respectively. Squares indicate the rst vortex and circles the second one. The thick
curve in b is an exponential t to the data for thick lms. Bottom wavelength: 20 mm, amplitude: 9 mm, inclination angle: 45.
FIG. 11. Film ow, as visualized by adding up series of tracer images, with a vortex in the trough of a bottom wave at 45 inclination angle a and without
a vortex at 80 inclination angle b. The main ow direction is along to mean inclination angle of the bottom contour. The lm is bent backwards at the
steeply falling edge. In a, the free surface is almost at at the rising edge. b shows the trough region only. The lm over the steeply falling edge is hardly
visualized since the free surface is almost parallel to the laser light. Bottom wavelength: 20 mm, amplitude: 9 mm, lm thickness: 1.1 mm.
432 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Wierschem, Scholle, and Aksel
locity as depicted in Fig. 4 is about three to four orders
smaller than the mean surface velocity.
Instead of the Reynolds number, the critical lm thick-
ness depends on the inclination angle and on the surface
tension as shown in Figs. 5 and 6. The dependence on the
inclination angle in Fig. 5 can be tted properly with a co-
tangent function. This, on the other hand, corresponds to the
ratio of the force acting in the direction perpendicular to the
mean inclination to that acting in ow direction. It also cor-
responds to the ratio of the horizontal to the vertical dis-
tances between the crests of the bottom and thus restricts the
amplitude of the free surface. The atter the free surface is,
the easier the vortices are generated, i.e., at zero inclination
the free surface has to be at even for thin lms. Surface
tension increases this effect as we have seen in Fig. 6. Low-
ering the Bond number, i.e., increasing the surface tension,
lowers the critical lm thickness. Increasing the effect of
surface tension yields a higher local lm thickness over the
trough of the bottom wave but also a atter surface for the
respective critical lm thickness. Thus, the curvature of the
surface has an impact on the critical lm thickness of the
vortex. This is in accordance with the observation that the
critical lm thickness decreases with the bottom waviness, as
shown in Fig. 8.
We speculate that the strong increase in the critical lm
thickness for lowering the waviness may yield a minimum
waviness below which no vortices can be generated. Since
this would be the case for innite lm thickness, surface
tension is not supposed to play any role. One the other hand,
the region for which a critical waviness exists is restricted for
high waviness as shows particularly Fig. 10a. Thus, beyond
a certain waviness, there exists always a vortex in the trough
of the bottom wave, no matter how low the volume ux may
be. As depicts Fig. 11a this seems to be due to the fact that
the local lm thickness reaches a lower limit determined by
the difference in the vertical position of the rising edge and
the trough of the bottom undulation. Like the critical lm
thickness for the generation of a vortex, the maximum wavi-
ness for a nonzero critical lm thickness also depends on the
inclination angle as shows Fig. 11. The logarithmic t shown
in Fig. 8 was chosen assuming a minimum waviness for the
possible generation of a vortex and a maximum waviness for
the existence of a critical lm thickness. The fact that it ts
well to the data points underlines this conclusion.
Beyond the critical lm thickness, the size of the vortex
is very sensitive to the lm thickness as shown in Fig. 6a
and then converges apparently to an asymptotic maximum
size as depicted in Fig. 3a. The convergence takes place
when the surface is already almost at and thus the stream-
lines close to the bottom hardly change anymore with the
lm thickness. The asymptotic value is independent of the
Bond number as indicates Fig. 6a, which is clear since the
surface is at for thick lms. But it also seems to be inde-
pendent of the inclination angle. Comparing the results for
the waviness 0.2 in Fig. 6 to those for a waviness of 0.45 in
FIG. 12. Film ow, as visualized by adding up series of
tracer images, with a perturbed vortex in the trough of a
bottom wave. The main ow direction is along to mean
inclination angle of the bottom contour. A single vortex
at an inclination angle of 80 is shown in a; b and c
show a second vortex at 45 inclination angle during
different time intervals. Bottom wavelength: 20 mm,
amplitude: 9 mm, lm thickness: 3.67 mm a, and
11.35 mm in b and c.
FIG. 13. Mean transport velocity at the free surface of a lm over a wavy
bottom compared to that over a at incline. The curve is an exponential
decay t to the data. Bottom wavelength: 5 mm, amplitude: 1 mm, inclina-
tion angle: 9.9.
433 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Vortices in lm ow
Fig. 10 shows that the vortex size seems to be a function of
the waviness.
Although the presence of a vortex changes the boundary
condition for the overlying lm ow downstream along the
separatrix from a no-slip condition to a slip condition, it does
not considerably increase the liquid transport as shown in
Fig. 13. For thin lms the transport velocity is signicantly
lower than that over a at plane, although there already ex-
ists a vortex in the trough. This is apparently due to an in-
crease of the mean lm thickness caused by the bottom un-
dulation as was shown in Ref. 5 for weakly wavy bottoms.
For thick lms on the other hand, the bottom undulation is
not supposed to play an important role anymore for the mean
surface velocity. Between these two extremes, we could not
nd clear-cut evidence for a possible enhancement within
experimental uncertainty.
In the bottom undulations of highest waviness we ob-
served a second vortex. It apparently shows the same quali-
tative behavior as the rst one. As shown in Fig. 8, there
apparently also exists a minimum waviness for its genera-
tion. The critical lm thickness also decreases with increas-
ing waviness. It also appears from Fig. 10a that its size
tends to an asymptotic value for thick lms.
B. Comparison to other studies of vortices at low
Reynolds numbers
We have seen that Reynolds number effects are not im-
portant in our study. Therefore, we conclude that the ob-
served vortices are not driven by inertia as those studied in
Refs. 68 and start comparing our ndings to Pozrikidis
numerical study of Stokes ow over sinusoidal inclined
planes.
9
He considered lm ow over bottom undulations
with a waviness of 0.01, 0.1, and 0.2 at inclination angles of
9 and 45. Furthermore, he studied the impact of the Bond
number. In our experiments, we covered the waviness rang-
ing from 0.13 to 0.5 at inclination angles ranging from 5 to
80. Both Pozrikidis numerical and our experimental study
coincide in the waviness 0.2 and the inclination angle of 45.
Although he mainly focuses on the free surface prole of the
lm while we center our attention on the vortices, we found
good agreement between the two studies whenever compa-
rable. As in our experiments, Pozrikidis observed from his
numerical calculations that the free surface is a nearly sym-
metric sinusoidal wave for thicker lms and it becomes al-
most horizontal over increasing slopes of the bottom for thin
lms. A comparison of Pozrikidis calculations for the free
surface amplitude at innite Bond number to our experimen-
tal data with Bo*4.5 shows good agreement and is repro-
duced in Fig. 14. Also the effect of the Bond number seems
to compare well qualitatively. Although the small Bond num-
bers are not the same in both studies, we observe as does
Pozrikidis that the surface amplitude does not tend to the
bottom amplitude for thin lms but to much smaller values.
The fact that the Pozrikidis calculations for a waviness
of 0.1 could not reveal any vortex coincides with our obser-
vation of a strong increase of the critical lm thickness by
lowering the waviness. For a waviness of 0.2, Pozrikidis did
not observe any vortex for thin lms but for thick lms.
Although he did not determine the critical lm thickness, at
least the points he studied t to ours, i.e., they show the same
qualitative behavior. Also the wall shear stress from which
he deduced the existence of a vortex is nearly symmetric
coinciding to our symmetric vortices for that parameters.
Pozrikidis stated that vortices occur beyond a critical wavi-
ness and that the critical lm thickness vanishes for very
large wave amplitudes, such as we have observed it in our
experiments. Unfortunately, however, he did not embark on
this subject and did not give evidence for it.
Like the systems studied experimentally by Taneda
10
we
found that the characteristic velocity of the second vortex is
several orders of magnitude smaller than that of the rst one.
In general, one may classify the different Stokes ows with
vortices studied by Taneda
10
into two groups: In one class,
vortices occur beyond a certain angle between the ow con-
ning boundaries such as Moffatts eddies.
13
There is no
length scale entering into this kind of problems and similar-
ity solutions are obtained. In the other group, the vortices are
generated below a certain length scale. Into this second class
fall the vortices between two spheres that are not in contact
of which the ow pattern has been calculated by Davis
et al.
11
The lm ow studied here belongs to this second
class with the waviness playing the role of a length scale
taking the lm thickness xed. Like, for instance, the case
described by Davis et al.,
11
increasing the waviness leads to
a generation of a further vortex. However, different from
those cases studied by Taneda
10
we have a free surface ow
and the lm thickness enters as a further parameter. Although
the experimentally accessible range for the lm thickness is
limited, it seems from our experiments that the maximum
number of vortices depends on the waviness and not on the
lm thickness.
In their experiments on free lm ow along vertical cor-
rugated surfaces, Zhao and Cerro
14
have observed vortices
between periodic convex half cycles independent of the lm
thickness. It seems to us that these are essentially those de-
scribed theoretically by Moffatt.
13
Besides these, they stated
that they found vortices only at the highest Reynolds num-
bers and Capillary numbers for walls shaped as triangles or
as concave half cycles but did not give evidence of these
FIG. 14. Comparison of the free surface amplitude with numerical calcula-
tions for Stokes ow by Pozrikidis. The experimental data are given as solid
squares; the numerical values, taken from Ref. 6, Fig. 5b, are indicated by
open squares. Parameters: waviness: 0.2 mm, inclination angle: 45, Bo*:
4.44 experimental and innity numerical.
434 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 2003 Wierschem, Scholle, and Aksel
observations. However, Malamataris and Bontozoglou have
calculated numerically the ow along concave half cycles
and found recirculation zones behind the corner at the lee
side of the half cycles for high ow rate and surface
tension.
17
By varying the lm thickness, Reynolds number,
and the Capillary number, they showed that the eddy can
disappear. They found as a common feature of these calcu-
lations that in all three cases the local lm thickness dimin-
ished. Apart from this, however, we nd certain differences
to our study: The vortices that are generated in the concave
half cycles seem to be a ow separation due to a corner ow
while there is nothing like this in our experiments. The vor-
tices in our study are in general symmetric in the trough of
the bottom while those vortices are at the lee side. Finally,
we could show that in our case the Reynolds number is not
important.
Negny et al.
15
observed a bulge of the lm over the at-
test part of an undulated substrate and concluded in accor-
dance with numerical calculations
18
that the swelling is
caused by an underlying vortex. Different from our vortices,
these ones occur at rather high Reynolds numbers and Negny
et al. suggest that viscous friction prevents the ow from
overcoming the pressure gradient in these regions. From the
fact that these vortices occur in the attest region of the
corrugations it seems clear that these vortex are different
from ours.
V. CONCLUSIONS
We have presented an experimental study of vortices in
gravity driven lms owing down sinusoidal bottom proles
of rather high waviness. The vortices were visualized em-
ploying a particle image velocimeter with uorescent tracers.
They were observed in the troughs of the undulated bottom
prole at low Reynolds numbers down to the order of 10
5
.
We showed that the Reynolds number is not responsible for
their generation. From the experimental data, it seems that
there exists a minimum waviness below which these vortices
cannot be generated. Beyond this minimum waviness, the
vortices occur beyond a critical lm thickness. The minimum
lm thickness for their generation increases with the inclina-
tion angle and is lowered by surface tension. The critical lm
thickness diminishes with increasing waviness until it
reaches zero. This waviness depends on the inclination angle.
Beyond this waviness, there exists always a vortex irrespec-
tively of the lm thickness. Further increasing the waviness
results in the generation of a second vortex beyond a critical
lm thickness. This second vortex occurs again in the trough
of the undulation and seems to have the same features as the
rst one. The size of the vortices strongly increases beyond
the critical lm thickness and tends asymptotically to a nite
value for thick lms that is independent of the inclination
angle or surface tension. Finally, we could not observe a
signicant increase of the transport velocity due to the vor-
tices.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors acknowledge the support of G. Jena, A.
Kammerer, A. Do

rnho

fer, F. Meisel, and of our engineer C.

Lepski.
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