Ligament Mediated Fragmentation of Viscoelastic Liquids
Name
PhysRevLett.117.154502.pdf
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1.17 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Houze, Eric C.
Moore, John R.
Koerner, Michael R.
Keshavarz, Bavand
McKinley, Gareth H
Date Issued
October 2016
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Keshavarz, Bavand et al. “Ligament Mediated Fragmentation of Viscoelastic Liquids.” Physical Review Letters 117.15 (2016): n. pag. © 2016 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The breakup and atomization of complex fluids can be markedly different than the analogous processes in a simple Newtonian fluid. Atomization of paint, combustion of fuels containing antimisting agents, as well as physiological processes such as sneezing are common examples in which the atomized liquid contains synthetic or biological macromolecules that result in viscoelastic fluid characteristics. Here, we investigate the ligament-mediated fragmentation dynamics of viscoelastic fluids in three different canonical flows. The size distributions measured in each viscoelastic fragmentation process show a systematic broadening from the Newtonian solvent. In each case, the droplet sizes are well described by Gamma distributions which correspond to a fragmentation-coalescence scenario. We use a prototypical axial step strain experiment together with high-speed video imaging to show that this broadening results from the pronounced change in the corrugated shape of viscoelastic ligaments as they separate from the liquid core. These corrugations saturate in amplitude and the measured distributions for viscoelastic liquids in each process are given by a universal probability density function, corresponding to a Gamma distribution with n_{min}=4. The breadth of this size distribution for viscoelastic filaments is shown to be constrained by a geometrical limit which can not be exceeded in ligament-mediated fragmentation phenomena.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hatsopoulos Microfluids Laboratory
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.154502
