Axisymmetric instability in a thinning electrified jet

The axisymmetric stability of an electrified jet is analyzed under electrospinning conditions using the linear stability theory. The fluid is considered Newtonian with a finite electrical conductivity, modeled as a leaky dielectric medium. While the previous studies impose axisymmetric disturbances on a cylindrical jet of uniform radius, referred to as the base state, in the present study the actual thinning jet profile, obtained as the steady-state solution of the one-dimensional slender filament model, is treated as the base state. The analysis takes into account the role of variation in the jet variables like radius, velocity, electric field, and surface charge density along the thinning jet in the stability behavior. The eigenspectrum of the axisymmetric disturbance growth rate is constructed from the linearized disturbance equations discretized using the Chebyshev collocation method. The most unstable growth rate for the thinning jet is significantly different from that for the uniform radius jet. For the same electrospinning conditions, while the uniform radius jet is predicted to be highly unstable, the thinning jet profile is found to be unstable but with a relatively very low growth rate. The stabilizing role of the thinning jet is attributed to the variation in the surface charge density as well as the extensional deformation rate in the fluid ignored in the uniform radius jet analysis. The dominant mode for the thinning jet is an oscillatory conducting mode driven by the field-charge coupling. The disturbance energy balance finds the electric force to be the dominant force responsible for the disturbance growth, potentially leading to bead formation along the fiber. The role of various material and process parameters in the stability behavior is also investigated.