Abstract
PURE degassed mercury in laminar and turbulent flow through a tube behaves as a typical Newtonian fluid with respect to velocity and temperature fields1,2, but in experimental work with mercury jets3, extreme cross sectional instabilities or inversions in the jet occur when the nozzle material is wetted by the mercury. When the flow is from non-wetting nozzles, the jet is much less prone to this type of instability. The nozzle materials were brass and stainless steel for the wetting and non-wetting conditions, respectively. The increase in scale of the inversions was attributed to the formation on the flow surface of the brass nozzle of an amalgam layer made up of a pasty material of composition intermediate between nozzle material and mercury, of unknown flow properties. Wetting of stainless steel by mercury can also be induced by the addition of materials possessing high oxygen affinities such as sodium or potassium, so a distinction should be made between the physical wetting of stainless steel by mercury with traces of wetting agents and the chemical wetting associated with amalgamation of brass or copper where an intermediate β-phase is formed4.
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