Sub-patterns of thin sheet splash on a smooth surface.

When a droplet impacts a smooth solid surface with sufficiently high inertia, a thin sheet is created and the whole droplet fluid then breaks apart. Latka1 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 sub-divided 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 Weber number and Ohnesorge number on the transitions of these sub-patterns were determined over large ranges of their values, and a regime nomogram in the parametric space of We-Oh was obtained.