Unconditional jetting

Abstract

Capillary jetting of a fluid dispersed into another immiscible phase is usually limited by a critical capillary number, a function of the Reynolds number and the fluid property ratios. Critical conditions are set when the minimum spreading velocity of small perturbations v ∗ − along the jet (marginal stability velocity) is zero. Here we identify and describe parametric regions of high technological relevance, where v ∗ − > 0 and the jet flow is always supercritical independently of the dispersed liquid flow rate; within these relatively broad regions, the jet does not undergo the usual dripping-jetting transition, so that either the jet can be made arbitrarily thin (yielding droplets of any imaginably small size), or the issuing flow rate can be made arbitrarily small. In this work, we provide illustrative analytical studies of asymptotic cases for both negligible and dominant inertia forces. In this latter case, requiring a nonzero jet surface velocity, axisymmetric perturbation waves “surf” downstream for all given wave numbers, while the liquid bulk can remain static. In the former case (implying small Reynolds flow) we found that the jet profile small slope is limited by a critical value; different published experiments support our predictions.