Breakup length of electrified liquid jets: Scaling laws and applications

Abstract

The growth rate of infinitesimal perturbations in electrified jets at the viscid and inviscid limits exhibit different behavior. Using Saville’s approach to estimate the growth rate for perturbations in the long wavelength limit and by neglecting the effects of gravity, we derived two scaling laws for the jet breakup length in two regimes of the Taylor cone mode. Our experimental measurements show clear dependency of the jet length on the flow rate; however changing the applied voltage has appeared to affect only the cone angle, but not to the jet itself. The experimental data has an excellent collapse with our theoretical model in both cases. The transition between viscid and inviscid limits appears to occur at an electric Reynolds number, based upon jet diameter of Re≃5. Finally, we showed how to enhance the quality and the resolution in Electrostatic Inkjet Printing applications by setting the printing distance lower than the jet length and predicting the line width as a function of the operational parameters.