Driving mechanisms of ratchet flow in thin liquid films under tangential two-frequency forcing

In a recent paper, we demonstrated the emergence of ratchet flows in thin liquid films subjected to tangential two-frequency vibrations [E. Sterman-Cohen, M. Bestehorn, and A. Oron, “Ratchet flow of thin liquid films induced by a two-frequency tangential forcing,” Phys. Fluids 30, 022101 (2018)], and asymmetric forcing was found to be a sole driving mechanism for these ratchet flows. In this paper, we consider other two-frequency excitations and reveal an additional driving mechanism of an emerging ratchet flow when the acceleration imparted by forcing is symmetric with respect to a certain moment of time within the forcing period (this type of forcing referred to as “symmetric forcing”). This driving mechanism exhibits an intricate interaction between forcing, capillarity, and gravity. We find that in contradistinction with the case of asymmetric forcing where the flow intensity reaches a constant value in the large-time limit, in the case of symmetric forcing the flow intensity exhibits oscillatory variation in time. We also discuss the flow intensity variation of the emerging ratchet flows with the fundamental wavenumber of the disturbance.