Drop impact on a thin fluid layer

The splash from the impact of a drop with a thin film of the same liquid arises from the emission, expansion and breakup of one or more sheets. This process has important implication for diverse physical processes such as gas transfer across the air-sea interface1, combustion, and cooling. The spray pattern and the distribution of secondary droplet sizes is in general highly complex and has yet to be understood. The simplest case is the formation and breakup of a sheet which results in the spray pattern immortalised by Harold Edgerton’s Milk Coronet, and studied by Peregrine. I with Jens Eggers and Philippe Brunet showed for the first time that this spatially regular splash is governed by the Rayleigh-Plateau instability, amplifying random microscopic noise. The number of secondary droplets is determined by the most unstable wavenumber of this instability.

Publications

R.D. Deegan, P. Brunet, & J. Eggers, "Complexities of splashing", Nonlinearity 21, C1–C11 (2008).

Updated May 14, 2008