APPLIED PHYSICAL SCIENCES Correction for “Geometry-induced capillary emptying,” by Carlos Rascón, Andrew O. Parry, and Dirk G. A. L. Aarts, which appeared in issue 45, November 8, 2016, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (113:12633–12636; first published October 24, 2016; 10.1073/pnas.1606217113).
The authors wish to note the following: “After the publication of our article, we have learned of three papers highly relevant to our research subject.
“In 1967, Masica studied experimentally the stability of liquid interfaces in a tube of circular cross-section under weightless conditions when accelerated transversally (1). This configuration is physically equivalent to a horizontal capillary. Masica’s findings, that stability only occurs provided the effective Bond number is smaller than a critical value, are consistent with our results.
“More recently, Manning, Collicott, and Finn studied theoretically the occlusion of a horizontal tube by a liquid plug, and derived a condition for the nonexistence of the plug (2). This condition happens to be the same as for the emptying of a capillary when turned to the horizontal, because both phenomena reduce to the existence of solutions of the same partial differential equation. Subsequently, Manning and Collicott apply this condition to a rectangular tube and note that no plug can exist when the contact angle is less than 45 degrees, irrespective of the value of the Bond number (3). This is very similar to our findings for spilling from capillaries of triangular cross-section, where we show that spilling must occur if the contact angle is less than 60 degrees for any cross-section size.
“We are very grateful to Profs. Finn, Manning, and Collicott for alerting us to their important work.”
1. Masica WJ (1967) Experimental investigation of liquid surface motion in response to lateral acceleration during weightlessness (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC). Technical Report NASA TN-D-4066.
2. Manning R, Collicott S, Finn R (2011) Occlusion criteria in tubes under transverse body forces. J Fluid Mech 682:397–414.
3. Manning RE, Collicott SH (2015) Existence of static capillary plugs in horizontal rectangular cylinders. Microfluidics Nanofluidics 19:1159–1168.