Application of the dissipative particle dynamics method to the instability problem of a liquid thread.

Abstract

We investigate the application of the dissipative particle dynamics method to the instability problem of a long liquid thread surrounded by another fluid. The dispersion curves obtained from simulations are compared with classic theoretical predictions. The results from standard dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations at first have a tendency of gradually approaching to Tomotika's Stokes flow prediction when the Reynolds number is decreased. But they then abnormally deviate again when the viscosity is very large. The same phenomenon is also confirmed in droplet retraction simulations when also compared with theoretical Stokes flow results. On the other hand, when a hard-core DPD model is used, with the decrease of the Reynolds number the simulation results did finally approach Tomotika's predictions when Re≈0.1. A combined presentation of the hard-core DPD results and the standard DPD results, excluding the abnormal ones, demonstrates that they are approximately on a continuum when labeled with Reynolds number. These results suggest that the standard DPD method is a suitable method for investigation of the instability problem of immersed liquid thread in the inertioviscous regime (0.1<Re<10), which is relevant for microfluidics applications but there is currently no theory. It cannot reach the Re≈0.1 regime because of some irregular properties of highly viscous DPD fluid, while the hard-core DPD is suitable to overcome this inferiority with standard DPD.