Subpatterns of Thin-Sheet Splash on a Smooth Surface

When a droplet impacts a smooth solid surface with a sufficiently high inertia, a thin sheet is created and the whole droplet fluid then breaks apart. Latka, A. [Thin-sheet creation and threshold pressures in drop splashing. Soft Matter 2017, 13, 740-747] defined it as thin-sheet splash. In this work, we used a high-speed camera with a long-distance microscope and experimentally showed that thin-sheet splash can be subdivided into three distinct patterns in terms of breakup location. Specifically, pattern 1 is characterized by the breakup of the rim with the thin sheet being intact, pattern 2 by the almost simultaneous breakup of both the rim and the thin sheet, and pattern 3 by the breakup of the thin sheet followed by the breakup of the rim. The effects of the Weber number and the Ohnesorge number on the transitions of these subpatterns were determined over large ranges of their values, and a regime nomogram in the parametric space of We-Oh was obtained.