Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 110, Issue 13, Pages 4905-4910Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1213708110
Keywords
electrohydrodynamics; tip-streaming; microfluidics; charged drops; nonlinearity
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Funding
- Basic Energy Sciences program of the US Department of Energy [DE-FG02-96ER14641]
- STFC [ST/J001465/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Drops subjected to strong electric fields emit charged jets from their pointed tips. The disintegration of such jets into a spray consisting of charged droplets is common to electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, printing and coating processes, and raindrops in thunderclouds. Currently, there exist conflicting theories and measurements on the size and charge of these small electrospray droplets. We use theory and simulation to show that conductivity can be tuned to yield three scaling regimes for droplet radius and charge, a finding missed by previous studies. The amount of charge (Q) over tilde that electrospray droplets carry determines whether they are coulombically stable and charged below the Rayleigh limit of stability ((Q) over tilde (R)) or are unstable and hence prone to further explosions once they are formed. Previous experiments reported droplet charge values ranging from 10% to in excess of (Q) over tilde (R). Simulations unequivocally show that electrospray droplets are coulombically stable at the instant they are created and that there exists a universal scaling law for droplet charge, (Q) over tilde = 0: 44 (Q) over tilde (R).
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