For rocket combustion and other applications, like watering your lawn with a hose, a stream of fluid may need to be broken up into droplets. While simply spraying a liquid jet will make it break up, waving that jet back and forth will break it up faster. A recent study simulated this problem numerically to determine the exact mechanisms driving that break-up. The researchers found two major culprits.
The first is a Kelvin-Helmholtz, or shear-based, instability. When a jet leaves the nozzle, there’s friction between it and the comparatively still air surrounding it. This creates tiny ripples in the surface that eventually grow into the distortions we can see, and it’s found in all jets, regardless of their side-to-side motion.
The second culprit, which is only found in the oscillating jet, is a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. By moving the jet side-to-side, you’re driving the dense liquid into less dense air, which creates a different set of disturbances that also help break up the jet. The final result: swinging the jet side-to-side breaks it into smaller droplets faster. (Image and research credit: S. Schmidt et al.)