Modeling of thin

turbulent liquid jet

propagation processes
accounting for spraying,
spinning, and droplet
disintegration.
INTRODUCTION
● Electrospraying
a. It is a drying technique based on the electrohydrodynamic processing of polymer
melts,solutions, or dispersions.
b. The solution is injected from a syringe needle toward a grounded collector.
c. The electrostatic forces used cause the liquid stream to be atomized into fine droplets.
● Electrospinning
a. It is a method that uses electric force to draw charged threads from polymer solutions or
polymer melts up to fiber.
b. The liquid droplet of polymer solution comes out of a nozzle under the action of high voltage,
where fibers of diameters in range of hundreds of nanometers are formed.
● Droplet Disintegration
a. When aerodynamic forces exceed surface tension, liquid starts to disintegrate into secondary
droplets.
b. “On demand droplet formation and control” finds lots of application in Aerospace industry.
(Also called DOD-Droplet On Demand)
c. Several dimensionless numbers like Weber number, Ohnesorge number, Stanton number
dictate the droplet break-up mechanism.
d. Capillary Instability in Liquid jets and drops play important role in break-up scaling.
 Electrospraying Electrospinning Droplet
Disintegration
MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVE
● Slender Jet dynamics is difficult to simulate using direct numerical simulation.
● Bead and string approach is a suitable alternative but lacks advance rheological constitutive
equations.
● A model was developed by Prof. Yarin and Entov polymer liquid jet break-up, later effects of
electric field was put in place of hydrodynamic stretching.
● Break-up depended on voltage supplied, DCD, length scale of Hadamard instability, onset of
bending perturbation.
● Bead formation depends on:
○ Solution viscosity and surface tension
○ net charge density carried by the electrospinning jet.
● We aim at implementing RCE to account for stress strain correlation using a lagrangian
framework.
● We aim at estimating porosity, permeability and 3D architecture of formed non-wovens.
● To address the proposed objectives we aim at tracking individual elements of polymer
jets/drops with respect to a lab-scale coordinate system whereas a lagarangain coordinate is
used to describe stretching behavior.
● The proposed methodology will be extended to Bag-Stamen break-up problems.
 METHODOLOGY
● Equations of motion
○ The nanofiber is modeled as a viscoelastic fluid and the EOM are:

● The spinneret nozzle is represented by a single mass-less point of charge ¯q fixed at x = 0 (nozzle
bead).
● The starting jet bead has an initial velocity s along the x axis equal to the bulk fluid velocity in the
syringe needle.
● All the quantities are stored in dimensionless units.
● First order accurate euler scheme and second, fourth order accurate Runge-Kutta schemes are
used to integrate.

Reference:
Marco Lauricella, Giuseppe Pontrelli, Ivan Coluzza, Dario Pisignano, Sauro Succi, JETSPIN: A specificpurpose
open-source software for electrospinning simulations of nanofibers, Computer Physics Communications,
197 (2015), 227-238.
CURRENT PROGRESS
● Model Development
○ Working on a lagrangian model for electrospinning.
● Code Development
○ Code for equation of motions has been developed in FORTRAN.