Near-critical behavior of the free surface of an ideally conducting liquid in an external electric field is considered. Based on an analysis of three-wave processes using the method of integral estimations, sufficient criteria for hard instability of a planar surface are formulated. It is shown that the higher-order nonlinearities do not saturate the instability, for which reason the growth of disturbances has an explosive character.
Development of strongly nonlinear structures at the charged boundary of a non-conducting liquid in an electric field
Institute of Electrophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院电物理研究所）；Lebedev Physical Institute, RAS（俄罗斯科学院列别杰夫物理研究所）；Institute of Electrophysics, Ural Division, Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院乌拉尔分院电物理研究所）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术学院）
Above a critical field strength, the free surface of an electrified, perfectly conducting viscous liquid, such as a liquid metal, is known to develop an accelerating protrusion resembling a cusp with a conic tip. Field self-enhancement from tip sharpening is reported to generate divergent power law growth in finite time of the forces acting in that region. Previous studies have established that tip sharpening proceeds via a self-similar process in two distinct limits - the Stokes regime at $\textsf{Re}=0$ and the inviscid regime $\textsf{Re} \to \infty$. Using finite element simulations to tra…
We analyse small-amplitude oscillations of a weakly viscous electrically conducting liquid drop in a strong uniform DC magnetic field. An asymptotic solution is obtained showing that the magnetic field does not affect the shape eigenmodes, which remain the spherical harmonics as in the non-magnetic case. Strong magnetic field, however, constrains the liquid flow associated with the oscillations and, thus, reduces the oscillation frequencies by increasing effective inertia of the liquid. In such a field, liquid oscillates in a two-dimensional (2D) way as solid columns aligned with the field. Tw…
The study investigates the problem of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) free convection over a non-isothermal axisymmetric body under the action of transverse magnetic field. The body is embedded in a porous medium saturated with electrically conducting non-Newtonian power law fluid. In order to obtain similarity solution, it is assumed that the viscosity of the fluid decays exponentially with temperature. The qualitative results are illustrated for a vertical flat plate, horizontal cylinder and sphere.
We investigate the electrohydrodynamics of an initially spherical droplet under the influence of an external alternating electric field by conducting axisymmetric numerical simulations using a charge-conservative volume-of-fluid based finite volume flow solver. The mean amplitude of shape oscillations of a droplet subjected to an alternating electric field for leaky dielectric fluids is the same as the steady-state deformation under an equivalent root mean squared direct electric field for all possible electrical conductivity ratio $(K_r)$ and permittivity ratio $(S)$ of the droplet to the sur…
We investigate inviscid instability in an electrically conducting fluid affected by a parallel magnetic field. The case of low magnetic Reynolds number in Poiseuille flow is considered. When the magnetic field is sufficiently strong, for a flow with low hydrodynamic Reynolds number, it is already known that the neutral disturbances are three-dimensional. Our investigation shows that at high hydrodynamic Reynolds number(inviscid flow), the effect of the strength of the magnetic field on the fastest growing perturbations is limited to a decrease of their oblique angle i.e. angle between the dire…
The motion of an interface separating two fluids under the effect of electric fields is a subject that has picked the attention of researchers from different areas. While there is an abundance of studies investigating the free surface wave properties, very few works have examined the associated velocity field within the bulk of the fluid. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate numerically the flow structure beneath solitary waves with constant vorticity on an inviscid conducting fluid bounded above by a dielectric gas under normal electric fields in the framework of a weakly nonlinear theory…
Liquid metal ion sources (LMIS) are widely used in applications ranging from local ion implantation in semiconductors, to focused ion beam systems for milling and nanolithography, to space micropropulsion devices being developed by NASA. Above a critically large field strength, an electrically stressed liquid metal develops one or more cuspidal protrusions which undergo accelerated conic tip sharpening with runaway field self-enhancement. Zubarev (2001) first predicted from an inviscid model that the electric stresses at the liquid apex undergo self-similar divergent growth in finite time. The…
Induced charge electrophoresis of a conducting cylinder suspended in a non-conducting cylindrical pore is theoretically analyzed, and a micromotor is proposed utilizing the cylinder rotation. The cylinder velocities are analytically obtained in the Dirichlet and the Neumann boundary conditions of the electric field on the cylindrical pore. The results show that the cylinder not only translates but also rotates when it is eccentric with respect to the cylindrical pore. The influences of a number of parameters on the cylinder velocities are characterized in detail. The cylinder trajectories show…
The nonaxisymmetric azimuthal magnetorotational instability is studied for hydromagnetic Taylor-Couette flows between cylinders of finite electrical conductivity. We find that the magnetic Prandtl number Pm determines whether perfectly conducting or insulating boundary conditions lead to lower Hartmann numbers for the onset of instability. Regardless of the imposed rotation profile, for small Pm the solutions for perfectly conducting cylinders become unstable for weaker magnetic fields than the solutions for insulating cylinders. The critical Hartmann and Reynolds numbers form monotonic functi…
We introduce six families of three-dimensional space-periodic steady solenoidal flows, whose kinetic helicity density is zero at any point. Four families are analytically defined. Flows in four families have zero helicity spectrum. Sample flows from five families are used to demonstrate numerically that neither zero kinetic helicity density, nor zero helicity spectrum prohibit generation of large-scale magnetic field by the two most prominent dynamo mechanisms: the magnetic $α$-effect and negative eddy diffusivity. Our computations also attest that such flows often generate small-scale field f…
We address magnetic-field generation by dynamo action in systems with inhomogeneous electrical conductivity and magnetic permeability. More specifically, we first show that the Taylor-Couette kinematic dynamo undergoes a drastic reduction of its stability threshold when a (zero-mean) modulation of the fluid's electrical conductivity or magnetic permeability is introduced. These results are obtained outside the mean-field regime, for which this effect was initially proposed. Beyond this illustrative example, we extend a duality argument put forward by Favier \& Proctor {(2013)} to show that swa…
We study experimentally and numerically the thinning of a Newtonian leaky-dielectric filament subject to an axial electric field. We consider moderately viscous liquids with high permittivity. The experiments show that satellite droplets are produced from the breakup of the filaments with high electrical permittivity due to the action of the electric field. Two electrified filaments with the same minimum radius thin at the same speed regardless of when the voltage was applied. The numerical simulations show that the polarization stress is responsible for the pinching delay observed in the expe…
We have observed that a rotating liquid soap film generates electricity when placed between two non-contact electrodes with a sufficiently large potential difference. In our experiments suspended liquid film (water + soap film) is formed on the surface of a circular frame, which is forced to rotate in the $x-y$ horizontal plane by a motor. This system is located at the center of two capacitor-like vertical plates to apply an external electric voltage difference in the $x-$direction. The produced electric current is collected from the liquid film using two conducting electrodes that are separat…
The room temperature liquid metal related electronics has been found important in a wide variety of emerging areas over the past few years. However, its failure features under high electrical current densities are not clear until now. Here we show that a liquid metal thin film would break-up as the applied current increases to a critical magnitude. The break-up phenomenon is attributed to be caused by the so-called electromigration effect. This problem could be one of the major hurdles that must be tackled with caution in the research and application of future liquid metal film electronics.
