Droplet baseball: skirting droplets rebounding from a rigid wall

Droplets of 1 cst silicone oil, with an initial velocity component tangent to the surface of a bath of the same fluid, will roll along the surface for hundreds of milliseconds, slowing exponentially until eventual coalescence. A rigid vertical wall, placed in the bath perpendicular to the path of the droplet, forces early coalescence either on the meniscus formed on the wall or after rebounding from the wall. By moving the wall along the line of motion of the droplet, a transition point is found in the droplet's trajectory in which, at a fixed wall position, the droplet may either coalesce within less than one droplet diameters distance from the turning point or travel many droplet diameters. We find a clear bi-modal distribution in droplet travel distance at this transition point and present a physical model to explain this interaction.