Lubrication derivation, general case

On the other hand, if a = 0, and the dynamics of the film is still dominated by body forces, then it appears from (6-3) that uc = eil1cpg/ii. In other cases, however, gravitational forces may play only a secondary role in the motion of the film, which is instead dominated by capillary forces. Then the appropriate choice for uc would involve the surface tension rather than either of the choices previously listed and the body-force terms in both (6-2) and (6-3) would be asymptotically small for the limit e -> 0. This then is a fundamental difference between this class of thin-film problems and the lubrication problems of the previous chapter. Here, the characteristic velocity will depend on the dominant physics, and if we want to derive general equations that can be used for more than one problem, we need to temporarily retain all of the terms that could be responsible for the film motion and only specify uc (and thus determine which terms are actually large or small) after we have decided which particular problem we wish to analyze. 

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