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Approach And Coalescence Of Liquid Drops In Air, Joseph Paulsen
Approach And Coalescence Of Liquid Drops In Air, Joseph Paulsen
Physics - All Scholarship
The coalescence of liquid drops has conventionally been thought to have just two regimes when the drops are brought together slowly in vacuum or air: a viscous regime corresponding to the Stokes-flow limit and a later inertially dominated regime. Recent work found that the Stokes-flow limit cannot be reached in the early moments of coalescence, because the inertia of the drops cannot be neglected then. Instead, the drops are described by an "inertially limited viscous" regime, where surface tension, inertia, and viscous forces all balance. The dynamics continue in this regime until either viscosity or inertia dominate on their own. …
Viscous To Inertial Crossover In Liquid Drop Coalescence, Joseph Paulsen
Viscous To Inertial Crossover In Liquid Drop Coalescence, Joseph Paulsen
Physics - All Scholarship
Using an electrical method and high-speed imaging, we probe drop coalescence down to 10 ns after the drops touch. By varying the liquid viscosity over two decades, we conclude that, at a sufficiently low approach velocity where deformation is not present, the drops coalesce with an unexpectedly late crossover time between a regime dominated by viscous and one dominated by inertial effects. We argue that the late crossover, not accounted for in the theory, can be explained by an appropriate choice of length scales present in the flow geometry.