MAE Seminar: Drop-Substrate Interactions: Sliding, Bouncing, and Vanishing in Thin Air

Details

MAE Seminar: Drop-Substrate Interactions: Sliding, Bouncing, and Vanishing in Thin Air

Date: January 13, 2026
Time: 12:50 PM Location: MAE-A 303

Dr. Chase T. Gabbard
Hope Street Postdoctoral Fellow
Brown University

Abstract
Our ability to harness liquid drops has shaped modern life–cleansing the air we breathe, regulating heat and moisture across engineered systems, and enabling precision technologies such as inkjet printing. Despite their everyday familiarity, drops reveal rich interfacial physics in the way they move and deform upon contact with surrounding surfaces. In this talk, I will explore these subtle interactions across three canonical systems. I begin with drops sliding between pairs of fibers, where geometric tuning enables control over their shape and speed, and can even suppress the capillary instability from which they emerge. I then move to Newtonian drops impacting rigid, non-wetting substrates, combining experiments and reduced-order modeling to reveal distinct deformation dynamics and energy recovery in the low-inertia limit. Shifting from solid to liquid substrates, I conclude by examining how the intervening gas layer governs drop–bath impacts, identifying regimes where drops bounce, coalesce, or transiently float, and comparing these results with model predictions that account for nanoscale gas kinetic and disjoining pressure effects in the evolving gas layer. Together, these findings deepen our understanding of drop–substrate interactions and provide physical insights that bridge fundamental interfacial physics with the design of advanced environmental and industrial technologies.

Biography
Chase Gabbard is a Hope Street Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering at Brown University. His research lies at the intersection of fluid mechanics and soft matter physics, with a focus on interfacial phenomena, granular matter, complex fluids, and fluid-structure interactions at the capillary scale. He is currently investigating droplet rebound, air-layer effects in liquid–liquid interactions, particle–interface interactions, the formation and stability of liquid sheets, and the water entry of solid spheres. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University, where he developed an experimental program to study capillary phenomena in flow down fibers, revealing a rich diversity of flow patterns and strategies to harness or suppress capillary instabilities. His overarching goal is to translate fundamental insights from carefully controlled tabletop experiments into practical advances in industrial and environmental technologies.

Faculty Host: Dr. Hugh Fan