Equatorial blowup and polar caps in drop electrohydrodynamics

Abstract

We illuminate effects of surface-charge convection intrinsic to leaky-dielectric electrohydrodynamics by analyzing the symmetric steady state of a circular drop in an external field at arbitrary electric Reynolds number ReE. In formulating the problem, we identify an exact factorization that reduces the number of dimensionless parameters from four—ReE and the conductivity, permittivity and viscosity ratios—to two: a modified electric Reynolds number Rẽ and a charging parameter ϖ. In the case ϖ<0, where charge relaxation in the drop phase is slower than in the suspending phase, and, as a consequence, the interface polarizes antiparallel to the external field, we find that above a critical Rẽ value the solution exhibits a blowup singularity such that the surface-charge density diverges antisymmetrically with the −1/3 power of distance from the equator. We use local analysis to uncover the structure of that blowup singularity, wherein surface charges are convected by a locally induced flow towards the equator where they annihilate. To study the blowup regime, we devise a numerical scheme encoding that local structure where the blowup prefactor is determined by a global charging-annihilation balance. We also employ asymptotic analysis to construct a universal problem governing the blowup solutions in the regime Rẽ≫1, far beyond the blowup threshold. In the case ϖ>0, where charge relaxation is faster in the drop phase and the interface polarizes parallel to the external field, we numerically observe and asymptotically characterize the formation at large Rẽ of stagnant, perfectly conducting surface-charge caps about the drop poles. The cap size grows and the cap voltage decreases monotonically with increasing conductivity or decreasing permittivity of the drop phase relative to the suspending phase. The flow in this scenario is nonlinearly driven by electrical shear stresses at the complement of the caps. In both polarization scenarios, the flow at large Rẽ scales linearly with the magnitude of the external field, contrasting the familiar quadratic scaling under weak fields. Published by the American Physical Society 2024