Scaling laws for jet pulsations associated with high-resolution electrohydrodynamic printing

This paper presents simple scaling laws that describe the intrinsic pulsation of a liquid jet that forms at the tips of fine nozzles under electrohydrodynamically induced flows. The jet diameter is proportional to the square root of the nozzle size and inversely proportional to the electric field strength. The fundamental pulsation frequency is proportional to the electric field strength raised to the power of 1.5. These scaling relationships are confirmed by experiments presented here and by data from the literature. The results are important for recently developed high-resolution ink jet printing techniques and other applications using electrohydrodynamics. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.