modelling water droplet movement on a leaf surface

modelling droplet movement on leaf surfaces is an important component in understanding how water, pesticide or nutrient is absorbed through the leaf surface. a simple mathematical model is proposed in this paper for generating a realistic, or natural looking trajectory of a water droplet traversing a virtual leaf surface. the virtual surface is comprised of a triangular mesh structure over which a hybrid clough–tocher seamed element interpolant is constructed from real-life scattered data captured by a laser scanner. the motion of the droplet is assumed to be affected by gravitational, frictional and surface resistance forces and the innovation of our approach is the use of thin-film theory to develop a stopping criterion for the droplet as it moves on the surface. the droplet model is verified and calibrated using experimental measurement; the results are promising and appear to capture reality quite well.