Thermocapillary effect on the absolute and convective instabilities of film flows down a fibre

Abstract We consider the motion of a gravity-driven flow down a uniformly heated vertical fibre. This flow exhibits rich dynamics including the formation of droplets, or beads, driven by a Rayleigh-Plateau mechanism modified by the presence of gravity as well as the thermocapillarity at the interface. A spatio-temporal stability analysis is performed to investigate the effect of thermocapillarity (Marangoni effect) on the convective/absolute instability (CI/AI) characteristics of the problem. We also performed a numerical simulation of Eq. (30) on the nonlinear evolution of the film to connect the breakup behaviours with the CI/AI characteristics. Our numerical results showed that for various Marangoni number (Ma), breakup of the film mainly occurs in the AI regime. With the increase of Ma, the film has a tendency to break up into droplets due to the enhancement of the absolute instability.