Surfactant Effects on the Dynamics of Capillary Rise and Finger Formation in Square Capillaries

We investigate the influence of surfactants on capillary rise and corner flow in angular pores. We therefore study capillary rise for simple fluids and surfactant solutions, comparing square to cylindrical capillaries. We show that fingers start to form in the corners of the square capillaries when the capillary rise slows down before reaching the equilibrium height. The corner flow scales as t1/3 and its quantitative understanding necessitates that the surface wettability is taken into account in terms of the liquid’s advancing contact angle on the capillary walls inside the corner. Adding surfactants to water greatly influences the corner flow in square capillaries: depending on the nature of the surfactant, the corner flow can be either suppressed completely due to autophobic effects or enhanced due to the presence of Marangoni stresses caused by a surface tension gradient inside the liquid fingers.