Spreading of miscible liquids

Miscible liquids commonly contact one another in natural and technological situations, often in the proximity of a solid substrate. In the scenario where a drop of one liquid finds itself on a solid surface and immersed within a second, miscible liquid, it will spread spontaneously across the surface. We show experimental findings of the spreading of sessile drops in miscible environments that have distinctly different shape evolution and power-law dynamics from sessile drops that spread in immiscible environments, which have been reported previously. We develop a characteristic time to scale radial data of the spreading sessile drops based on a drainage flow due to gravity. This time scale is effective for a homologous subset of the liquids studied. However, it has limitations when applied to significantly chemically different, yet miscible, liquid pairings; we postulate that the surface energies between each liquid and the solid surface becomes important for this other subset of the liquids studied. Initial experiments performed with pendant drops in miscible environments support the drainage flow observed in the sessile drop systems.