  We report a molecularly-augmented continuum-based computational model of
dynamic wetting and apply it to the displacement of an externally-driven liquid
plug between two partially-wetted parallel plates. The results closely follow
those obtained in a recent molecular-dynamics (MD) study of the same problem
Toledano (2021) which we use as a benchmark. We are able to interpret the
maximum speed of dewetting $U^*_{\mathrm{crit}}$ as a fold bifurcation in the
steady phase diagram and show that its dependence on the true contact angle
$\theta_{\mathrm{cl}}$ is quantitatively similar to that found using MD. A key
feature of the model is that the contact angle is dependent on the speed of the
contact line, with $\theta_{\mathrm{cl}}$ emerging as part of the solution. The
model enables us to study the formation of a thin film at dewetting speeds
$U^*>U^*_{\mathrm{crit}}$ across a range of length scales, including those that
are computationally prohibitive to MD simulations. We show that the thickness
of the film scales linearly with the channel width and is only weakly dependent
on the capillary number. This work provides a link between matched asymptotic
techniques (valid for larger geometries) and MD simulations (valid for smaller
geometries). In addition, we find that the apparent angle, the experimentally
visible contact angle at the fold bifurcation, is not zero. This is in contrast
to the prediction of conventional treatments based on the lubrication model of
flow near the contact line, but consistent with experiment.
