The rapid expansion and subsequent detachment of a drop or bubble are examined in this paper. Establishing the hydrodynamics of the drop growth and detachment process has applications ranging from improving insight into nucleate pool boiling, to improving techniques used to characterize dynamic surface tension. Here, the growth and detachment dynamics of viscous drops are studied numerically to establish an accurate description of the hydrodynamics. The full two-dimensional axisymmetric Navier-Stokes equations are solved using a single fluid volume-of-fluid (VOF) formulation on a fixed Eulerian grid. The interface is represented by marker particles that are convected in a Lagrangian manner on the underlying Eulerian grid. Results for surfactant-free, isothermal droplets from hemispherical caps to near detachment are presented.
