In this seminar, I will present our recent work on the normal impact of flexible bodies on a liquid-gas interface, spanning from capillary to inertially dominated regimes.

I will begin by discussing the rebound of small droplets impacting a deep bath of the same fluid. Through a combination of experiment, modeling, and direct numerical simulation, the dependence of various rebound metrics on the non-dimensional parameters of the problem will be revealed. In particular, the inertio-capillary limit is shown to define an upper bound on the possible coefficient of restitution for droplet-bath impact, wherein a significant fraction of the incident energy is transferred into oscillations of the bath and droplet.

Then moving to larger scales, I will examine the high-speed air-water entry of a two degree-of-freedom solid impactor comprised of a rigid nose elastically coupled to a trailing body. Our experiments demonstrate that the added flexibility can either decrease or increase the peak force experienced by the body during water entry, depending sensitivity on the parameters of the problem. I will present a simple model that is able to capture our measurements and collapse the data using an appropriately defined hydroelastic number.