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. 2019 Jun 17;116(28):13780–13784. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1819744116

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

Displacement of a partially wetting liquid from a microcapillary tube. As the glycerol (white) is withdrawn from the right end of the tube with a constant flow rate Q, air (black) invades the tube from the left end at atmospheric pressure and entrains a thin film of the glycerol on the tube walls (the white stripe in the middle of the tube is due to light refraction; SI Appendix, section 1). The entrained liquid film then starts receding along the tube axis with a velocity Ucl, forming a growing dewetting rim ahead of the contact line, where the liquid, solid, and air meet at a nonzero apparent contact angle θap. As the liquid rim grows, the bubble neck diameter shrinks and ultimately leads to pinch-off and the formation of a bubble.