Numerical investigation of the disintegration of liquid jets

Abstract

A numerical investigation of the capillary instability and disintegration of infinite liquid jets of a circular cross section is carried out. All the nonlinear and viscous terms are included. A vorticity-stream function formulation is used in conjunction with a new computer-generated numerical algorithm to ensure the requisite accuracy and to facilitate the treatment of the free surface boundary. Successive surface profiles are compute. These results show that the nonlinear terms are responsible for the nonuniformity of the sizes of drops produced in jet disintegration. In the case of a jet of water, satellites are obtained for all the unstable disturbances treated. The sizes of these satellites are found to increase with the disturbance wavelength. The computed drop sizes for a jet of water are generally in good agreement with the experimental observations of previous investigators.