Capillary imbibition in a square tube

Abstract

When a square tube is brought in contact with bulk liquid, the liquid wets the corners of the tube and creates finger-like wetted regions. The wetting of the liquid then takes place with the growth of two parts, the bulk part where the cross section is entirely filled with the liquid and the finger part where the cross section of the tube is partially filled. In previous works, the growth of these two parts has been discussed separately. Here we conduct the analysis by explicitly accounting for the coupling of the two parts. We propose coupled equations for liquid imbibition in both parts and show that (a) the length of each part, h₀ and h₁, both increases in time t following Lucas–Washburn's law, h₀ ∼ t^1/2 and h₁ ∼ t^1/2, but that (b) the coefficients are different from those obtained in the previous analysis which ignored the coupling.