Capillary effects on floating cylindrical particles

In this study, we develop a systematic perturbation procedure in the small parameter, B1/2, where B is the Bond number, to study capillary effects on small cylindrical particles at interfaces. Such a framework allows us to address many problems involving particles on flat and curved interfaces. In particular, we address four specific problems: (i) capillary attraction between cylinders on flat interface, in which we recover the classical approximate result of Nicolson [“The interaction between floating particles,” Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 45, 288–295 (1949)10.1017/S0305004100024841], thus putting it on a rational basis; (ii) capillary attraction and aggregation for an infinite array of cylinders arranged on a periodic lattice, where we show that the resulting Gibbs elasticity obtained for an array can be significantly larger than the two cylinder case; (iii) capillary force on a cylinder floating on an arbitrary curved interface, where we show that in the absence of gravity, the cylinder experiences a...