Suppressing drop rebound by electrically driven shape distortion

We report that electrically driven shape deformation of a drop strongly affects the impacting behavior. The experiment shows that when a nonaxisymmetric drop impacts on hydrophobic substrates, it alternately spreads and recoils along two principal axes, subsequently suppressing its rebound. The rebound suppressions of the drops are investigated as a function of the Weber number, and consequently the critical We causing rebound is considerably higher than that of an axisymmetric drop. We rationalize the impacting behaviors originated from the breakup of axisymmetry using the three-dimensional numerical simulation. The simulations of nonaxisymmetric drops completely predict the axis-switching and reveal the consequent kinetic energy transfer between the horizontal principal axes rather than the vertical axis.