Hariprasad J. Subramani

Simplicity and complexity in a dripping faucet

Continuous emission of drops of an incompressible Newtonian liquid from a tube–dripping–is a much studied problem because it is important in applications as diverse as inkjet printing, microarraying, and microencapsulation, and recognized as the prototypical nonlinear dynamical system, viz., the leaky faucet. The faucet’s dynamics are studied in this paper by a combination of experiment, using high-speed imaging, and computation, in which the one-dimensional slender-jet equations are solved numerically by finite element analysis, over ranges of the governing parameters that have heretofore been unexplored. Previous studies when the Bond number G that measures the relative importance of gravitational to surface tension force is moderate, G≈0.5, and the Ohnesorge number Oh that measures the relative importance of viscous to surface tension force is low, Oh≈0.1, have shown that the dynamics changes from (a) simple dripping, i.e., period-1 dripping with or without satellites, to (b) complex dripping, where th...