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Bifurcation Of The Equilibrium States Of A Weightless Liquid Bridge, Lev A. Slobozhanin, J. Iwan D. Alexander, Andrew Resnick

Physics Faculty Publications

The bifurcation of the solutions of the nonlinear equilibrium problem of a weightless liquid bridge with a free surface pinned to the edges of two coaxial equidimensional circular disks is examined. The bifurcation is studied in the neighborhood of the stability boundary for axisymmetric equilibrium states with emphasis on the boundary segment corresponding to nonaxisymmetric critical perturbations. The first approximations for the shapes of the bifurcated equilibrium surfaces are obtained. The stability of the bifurcated states is then determined from the bifurcation structure. Along the maximum volume stability limit, depending on values of the system parameters, loss of stability with …