Marie-Jean Thoraval

von Kármán vortex street within an impacting drop.

The splashing of a drop impacting onto a liquid pool produces a range of different sized microdroplets. At high impact velocities, the most significant source of these droplets is a thin liquid jet emerging at the start of the impact from the neck that connects the drop to the pool. We use ultrahigh-speed video imaging in combination with high-resolution numerical simulations to show how this ejecta gives way to irregular splashing. At higher Reynolds numbers, its base becomes unstable, shedding vortex rings into the liquid from the free surface in an axisymmetric von Kármán vortex street, thus breaking the ejecta sheet as it forms.

Vortex-ring-induced large bubble entrainment during drop impact.

For a limited set of impact conditions, a drop impacting onto a pool can entrap an air bubble as large as its own size. The subsequent rise and rupture of this large bubble plays an important role in aerosol formation and gas transport at the air-sea interface. The large bubble is formed when the impact crater closes up near the pool surface and is known to occur only for drops that are prolate at impact. Herein we use experiments and numerical simulations to show that a concentrated vortex ring, produced in the neck between the drop and the pool, controls the crater deformations and pinchoff. However, it is not the strongest vortex rings that are responsible for the large bubbles, as they interact too strongly with the pool surface and self-destruct. Rather, it is somewhat weaker vortices that can deform the deeper craters, which manage to pinch off the large bubbles. These observations also explain why the strongest and most penetrating vortex rings emerging from drop impacts are not produced by oblate drops but by more prolate drop shapes, as had been observed in previous experiments.