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Pressure corrections for potential flow analysis of capillary instability of viscous fluids

By J. WANG1, D. D. JOSEPH1 AND T. FUNADA2

1Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, University of Minnesota, 110 Union St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
2Department of Digital Engineering, Numazu College of Technology, 3600 Ooka, Numazu, Shizuoka, 410-8501, Japan

(Received March, 2004 and in revised form August 2004)

Abstract

Funada & Joseph (2002) analyzed capillary instability assuming that the flow is irrotational but the fluids are viscous (viscous potential flow, VPF). They compared their results with the exact normal mode solution of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations (fully viscous flow, FVF) and with the irrotational flow of inviscid fluids (inviscid potential flow, IPF). They showed that the growth rates computed by VPF are close to the exact solution when Reynolds number is larger than O(10) and are always more accurate than those computed using IPF. Recently, Joseph & Wang (2004) presented a method for computing a viscous correction of the irrotational pressure induced by the discrepancy between non-zero irrotational shear stress and the zero shear stress boundary condition at a free surface. The irrotational flow with a corrected pressure is called viscous correction of VPF (VCVPF). Here we compute the pressure correction for capillary instability in cases in which one fluid is viscous and the other fluid is a gas of negligible density and viscosity. The growth rates computed using VCVPF are in remarkably good agreement with the exact solution FVF.