ALBERT

Description: This paper investigates the axisymmetric instability of a viscoelastic compound jet, for which the constitutive relation is described by the Oldroyd B model. It is found that a viscoelastic compound jet is more unstable than a Newtonian compound jet, regardless of whether the viscoelastic compound jet is inner-Newtonian-outer-viscoelastic, inner-viscoelastic-outer-Newtonian, or fully viscoelastic. It is also found that an increase in the stress relaxation time of the inner or outer fluid renders the jet more unstable, while an increase in the time constant ratio makes the jet less unstable. An analysis of the energy budget of the destabilization process is performed, in which a formulation using the relative rate of change of energy is adopted. The formulation is observed to provide a quantitative analysis of the contribution of each physical factor (e.g., release of surface energy and viscous dissipation) to the temporal growth rate. The energy analysis reveals the mechanisms of various trends in the temporal growth rate, including not only how the growth rate changes with the parameters, but also how the growth rate changes with the wavenumber. The phenomenon of the dispersion relation presenting two local maxima, which occurred in previous research, is explained by the present energy analysis.

Description: This paper investigates the spatial instability of a double-layer viscous liquid sheet moving in a stationary gas medium. A linear stability analysis is conducted and two situations are considered, an inviscid-gas situation and a viscous-gas situation. In the inviscid-gas situation, the basic state of the entire gas phase is stationary and the analytical dispersion relation is derived. Similar to single-layer sheets, the instability of double-layer sheets presents two unstable modes, the sinuous and the varicose modes. However, the result of the base-case double-layer sheet indicates that the cutoff wavenumber of the dispersion curve is larger than that of a single-layer sheet. A decomposition of the growth rate is performed and the result shows that for small wavenumbers, the surface tension of all three interfaces and the aerodynamic forces of both the lower and upper gases contribute significantly to the unstable growth rate. In contrast, for large wavenumbers the major contribution to the unstable growth rate is only the surface tension of the upper interface and the aerodynamic force of the upper gas. In the viscous-gas situation, although the majority of the gas phase is stationary, gas boundary layers exist at the vicinity of the moving liquid sheet, and the stability problem is solved by a spectral collocation method. Compared with the inviscid-gas solution, the growth rate at large wavenumber is significantly suppressed. The decomposition of growth rate indicates that all the aerodynamic and surface tension terms behave consistently throughout the entire unstable wavenumber range. The effects of various parameters are discussed. In addition, the effect of gas viscosity and the gas velocity profile is investigated separately, and the results indicate that both factors affect the maximum growth rate and the dominant wavenumber, although the effect of the gas velocity profile is stronger than that of the gas viscosity.