Mesoscopic modeling of a two-phase flow in the presence of boundaries: The contact angle

We present a mesoscopic model, based on the Boltzmann equation, for the interaction between a solid wall and a nonideal fluid. We present an analytic derivation of the contact angle in terms of the surface tension between the liquid-gas, the liquid-solid, and the gas-solid phases. We study the dependency of the contact angle on the two free parameters of the model, which determine the interaction between the fluid and the boundaries, i.e. the equivalent of the wall density and of the wall-fluid potential in molecular dynamics studies. We compare the analytical results obtained in the hydrodynamical limit for the density profile and for the surface tension expression with the numerical simulations. We compare also our two-phase approach with some exact results obtained by E. Lauga and H. Stone [J. Fluid. Mech. 489, 55 (2003)] and J. Philip [Z. Angew. Math. Phys. 23, 960 (1972)] for a pure hydrodynamical incompressible fluid based on Navier-Stokes equations with boundary conditions made up of alternating slip and no-slip strips. Finally, we show how to overcome some theoretical limitations connected with the discretized Boltzmann scheme proposed by X. Shan and H. Chen [Phys. Rev. E 49, 2941 (1994)] and we discuss the equivalence between the surface tension defined in terms of the mechanical equilibrium and in terms of the Maxwell construction. © 2006 The American Physical Society.