Viscous dynamics of drops and bubbles in Hele-Shaw cells: Drainage, drag friction, coalescence, and bursting

In this review article, we discuss recent studies on drops and bubbles in Hele-Shaw cells, focusing on how scaling laws exhibit crossovers from the three-dimensional counterparts and focusing on topics in which viscosity plays an important role. By virtue of progresses in analytical theory and high-speed imaging, dynamics of drops and bubbles have actively been studied with the aid of scaling arguments. However, compared with three-dimensional problems, studies on the corresponding problems in Hele-Shaw cells are still limited. This review demonstrates that the effect of confinement in the Hele-Shaw cell introduces new physics allowing different scaling regimes to appear. For this purpose, we discuss various examples that are potentially important for industrial applications handling drops and bubbles in confined spaces by showing agreement between experiments and scaling theories. As a result, this review provides a collection of problems in hydrodynamics that may be analytically solved or that may be worth studying numerically in the near future. [Display omitted] •Various dynamics of drops and bubbles in confined spaces are reviewed.•Differences from three-dimensional counterparts are clarified.•Diverse manifestation of viscous dispassion in thin films is demonstrated.•Scaling laws potentially useful for industrial applications are discussed.•Future problems for analytical theories and numerical studies are collected.