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The circular capillary jump

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2020

Rajesh K. Bhagat*
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Wilberforce Road, CambridgeCB3 0WA, UK
P. F. Linden
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Wilberforce Road, CambridgeCB3 0WA, UK
*
†Email address for correspondence: rkb29@cam.ac.uk

Abstract

In this paper we re-examine the flow produced by the normal impact of a laminar liquid jet onto an infinite plane when the flow is dominated by surface tension. Over the range of parameters we consider, which are typical of water from a tap over a kitchen sink, it is observed experimentally that after impact the liquid spreads radially over the plane away from the point of impact in a thin film. It is also observed that, at a finite radius, there is an abrupt increase in thickness of the film which has been identified as a hydraulic jump. Once the jump is formed this radius remains constant in time and, further, is independent of the orientation of the surface showing that gravity is unimportant (Bhagat et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 851, 2018, R5). We show that the application of conservation of momentum in the film, subject only to viscosity and surface tension and ignoring gravity completely, predicts a singularity in the curvature of the liquid film and consequently a jump in the depth of the film at a finite radius. This location is almost identical to the radius of the jump predicted by conservation of energy and agrees with experimental observations. We also provide the correct boundary condition to be applied at an interface, where there is a change in interfacial area as a result of the fluid flow, that accounts for the energy change associated with fluid molecules’ exchange between the interface and the bulk.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1. Parameters used in published experiments. The jet flow rate $Q$, the critical flow rate $Q_{C}$ at which gravity begins to play a role, the surface tension $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}$, the kinematic viscosity $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}$ and the density $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}$ of the fluid.

Figure 1

Figure 1. An illustrative sketch of a circular hydraulic jump on an infinite plate that was reported experimentally by Bhagat et al. (2018), along with a history of the interfacial surface area of a material fluid volume, $V=\unicode[STIX]{x03C0}a^{2}l$ (indicated as 0), where $a$ is the radius of the jet. The annular surfaces are the top views of the surface of the material volume at different instances when it passes through locations 1 and 2 in the supercritical region and 3 in subcritical region. The surface area of the material volume is inversely proportional to the liquid film thickness $h$, which in the supercritical region where $h$ decreases implies an increase in surface area. At the location of hydraulic jump an abrupt change of liquid film thickness implies a release of the surface energy.

Figure 2

Figure 2. A schematic of the differential control volume showing the slope of the thin liquid film, and a contour, $C$ enclosing an interfacial surface, $S$.

Figure 3

Figure 3. (a) Schematic velocity profiles in a flow with conventional flat surface assumption with zero radial viscous stress (black) and liquid interface with zero tangential stress but non-zero radial stress (red). The surface tension force retards the flow in the radial direction and accelerates it in the wall-normal direction, giving non-zero radial and wall-normal viscous stresses at the surface (3.1). (b) An idealised hydraulic jump.