Gravity driven jets

The aim of this project is to understand the effect of external noise (in the form of harmonic perturbations) on a vertically falling liquid jet under the influence of gravity.
Jets are encountered frequently in nature as well as in scientific applications, some of which being inkjet printing, mono disperse powder production, and localised drug delivery in the human body. These applications require the jet to breakup into specific predetermined sized droplets with a given frequency of droplet production. For this purpose we will consider globally stable flows which are very receptive to incoming disturbances due to their large amplification potential and predict their behaviour to external forcing.

With this project the student will understand the derivation of 1 dimensional Navier Stokes equation  for liquid jets (Eggers & Dupont, 1994) and will carry out the direct numerical simulation for jets.

A basic knowledge of MATLAB will be advantageous.

Droplet formation due to a harmonic forcing at nozzle exit. The scale bar corresponds to 200 mum (van Hoeve et al., 2010)​.