Correlation between morphological evolution of splashing drop and exerted impact force revealed by interpretation of explainable artificial intelligence

This study reveals a possible correlation between splashing morphology and the normalized impact force exerted by an impacting drop on a solid surface. This finding is obtained from a newly proposed feature extraction method and a subsequent interpretation of the classification of splashing and non-splashing drops performed by an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) video classifier. Notably, the values of the weight matrix elements of the XAI that correspond to the extracted features are found to change with the temporal evolution of the drop morphology. We compute the rate of change of the contributions of each frame with respect to the classification value of a video as an important index to quantify the contributions of the extracted splashing and non-splashing features at different impact times to the classification of the XAI model. Remarkably, the rate computed for the extracted splashing features is found to closely match the profile of the normalized impact force, where the splashing features are most pronounced immediately after the normalized impact force reaches its peak value. This study has provided an example that clarifies the relationship between the complex morphological evolution of a splashing drop and physical parameters by interpreting the classification of an XAI video classifier.

Prediction of the morphological evolution of a splashing drop using an encoder-decoder

The impact of a drop on a solid surface is an important phenomenon that has various implications and applications. However, the multiphase nature of this phenomenon causes complications in the prediction of its morphological evolution, especially when the drop splashes. While most machine-learning-based drop-impact studies have centred around physical parameters, this study used a computer-vision strategy by training an encoder-decoder to predict the drop morphologies using image data. Herein, we show that this trained encoder-decoder is able to successfully generate videos that show the morphologies of splashing and non-splashing drops. Remarkably, in each frame of these generated videos, the spreading diameter of the drop was found to be in good agreement with that of the actual videos. Moreover, there was also a high accuracy in splashing/non-splashing prediction. These findings demonstrate the ability of the trained encoder-decoder to generate videos that can accurately represent the drop morphologies. This approach provides a faster and cheaper alternative to experimental and numerical studies.

Features of a Splashing Drop on a Solid Surface and the Temporal Evolution extracted through Image-Sequence Classification using an Interpretable Feedforward Neural Network

This paper reports the features of a splashing drop on a solid surface and the temporal evolution, which are extracted through image-sequence classification using a highly interpretable feedforward neural network (FNN) with zero hidden layer. The image sequences used for training-validation and testing of the FNN show the early-stage deformation of milli-sized ethanol drops that impact a hydrophilic glass substrate with the Weber number ranges between 31-474 (splashing threshold about 173). Specific videographing conditions and digital image processing are performed to ensure the high similarity among the image sequences. As a result, the trained FNNs achieved a test accuracy higher than 96%. Remarkably, the feature extraction shows that the trained FNN identifies the temporal evolution of the ejected secondary droplets around the aerodynamically lifted lamella and the relatively high contour of the main body as the features of a splashing drop, while the relatively short and thick lamella as the feature of a nonsplashing drop. The physical interpretation for these features and their respective temporal evolution have been identified except for the difference in contour height of the main body between splashing and nonsplashing drops. The observation reported in this study is important for the development of a data-driven simulation for modeling the deformation of a splashing drop during the impact on a solid surface.

Image features of a splashing drop on a solid surface extracted using a feedforward neural network

This article reports nonintuitive characteristic of a splashing drop on a solid surface discovered through extracting image features using a feedforward neural network (FNN). Ethanol of area-equivalent radius about 1.29 mm was dropped from impact heights ranging from 4 cm to 60 cm (splashing threshold 20 cm) and impacted on a hydrophilic surface. The images captured when half of the drop impacted the surface were labeled according to their outcome, splashing or nonsplashing, and were used to train an FNN. A classification accuracy higher than 96% was achieved. To extract the image features identified by the FNN for classification, the weight matrix of the trained FNN for identifying splashing drops was visualized. Remarkably, the visualization showed that the trained FNN identified the contour height of the main body of the impacting drop as an important characteristic differentiating between splashing and nonsplashing drops, which has not been reported in previous studies. This feature was found throughout the impact, even when one and three-quarters of the drop impacted the surface. To confirm the importance of this image feature, the FNN was retrained to classify using only the main body without checking for the presence of ejected secondary droplets. The accuracy was still higher than 82%, confirming that the contour height is an important feature distinguishing splashing from nonsplashing drops. Several aspects of drop impact are analyzed and discussed with the aim of identifying the possible mechanism underlying the difference in contour height between splashing and nonsplashing drops.