The beads-on-string structure of viscoelastic threads

By Christian Clasen, Jens Eggers, Marco Antonio Fontelos, Jie Li, G. H. McKinley. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2003

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By adding minute concentrations of a high-molecular-weight polymer, liquid jets or bridges collapsing under the action of surface tension develop a characteristic shape of uniform threads connecting spherical fluid drops. In this paper, high-precision measurements of this beads-on-string structure are combined with a theoretical analysis of the limiting case of large polymer relaxation times and high polymer extensibilities, for which the evolution can be divided into two distinct regimes. For times smaller than the polymer relaxation time over which the beads-on-string structure develops, we give a simplified local description, which still retains the essential physics of the problem. At times much larger than the relaxation time, we show that the solution consists of exponentially thinning threads connecting almost spherical drops. Both experiment and theoretical analysis of a one-dimensional model equation reveal a self-similar structure of the corner where a thread is attached to the neighbouring drops.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38c0256c57a55bf124d5b52f1499cecbf18fd492

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In Computational Mechanics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Viscoelasticity in inkjet printing (2010, methodology): “A detailed review of polymeric inkjet applications was given by de Gans et al. (2004).”
Formation of beads-on-a-string structures during break-up of viscoelastic filaments (2010, background): “, Figure 1 of Clasen et al.(16), where the authors show experimental images of the thinning of a high-viscosity, low surface tension polymeric thread at Oh = 222).”