Extended Abstract

Introduction. The coating of liquids onto solids is an important industrial process. A prerequisite for successful coating is that the liquid dynamically wet the surface of the solid. One of the limits to high-speed coating is the onset of dynamic wetting failure, which leads to air entrainment. In simple experi-ments in which a tape or fiber plunges vertically into a pool of liquid, air entrainment usually occurs at capillary numbers Ca < 1. However this limit is not immutable. Indeed, the term “hydrodynamic assist