Breakup of an electrified viscous thread with charged surfactants

Abstract

The dynamics and breakup of electrified viscous jets in the presence of ionic surfactants at the interface are investigated theoretically. Axisymmetric configurations are considered and the jet is surrounded by a concentrically placed cylindrical electrode, which is held at a constant voltage potential. The annular region between the jet and the electrode is taken to be a hydrodynamically passive dielectric medium and an electric field is set up there and drives the flow, along with other physical mechanisms including capillary instability and viscous effects. The jet fluid is taken to be a symmetric electrolyte and proper modeling of the cationic and anionic species is used by considering the Nernst–Planck equations in order to find the volume charge density that influences the electric field in the jet. A positively charged insoluble surfactant is present at the interface, and its evolution, as well as the resulting value of the local surface tension coefficient, is coupled with the voltage potential at the interface. The resulting coupled nonlinear systems are derived and analytical progress is made by carrying out a nonlinear slender jet approximation. The reduced model is described by a number of hydrodynamic, electrical, and electrokinetic parameters, and an extensive computational study is undertaken to elucidate the dynamics along with allied linear properties. It is established that the jet ruptures in finite time provided the outer electrode is sufficiently far away, and numerous examples are given where the dimensionless parameters can be used to control the size of the satellite drops that form beyond the topological transition, as well as the time to break up. It is also shown that pinching solutions follow the self-similar dynamics of clean viscous jets at times close to the breakup time. Finally, a further asymptotic theory is developed for large Debye layers to produce an additional model that incorporates the effects of surface charge diffusion. Numerical solutions establish that the presence of electrostatic and electrokinetic effects increases the sizes of satellites but have a rather weak influence on the time to rupture.