Instability of viscoelastic curved liquid jets with surfactants

• We model viscoelastic rotating liquid jets with surfactants.
• Increasing surfactants leads to different growth rates.
• Altering rotation rates leads to differences in growth rates.
• Steady state solutions are affected by surfactants and rotation.

The prilling process is a common technique utilised in different applications in many industrial and engineering processes. Typically in such a process a liquid jet emerges from an orifice and thereafter breaks up into small spherical droplets of various sizes due to interfacial instabilities. As is common in many industrial applications the fluid used is often a mixture of various fluids and will typically contain polymers or other additives which will cause the fluid to behave like a non-Newtonian fluid. Furthermore, surfactants may be used in such processes to manipulate the size of the resulting droplets. In this paper, we model the fluid as a viscoelastic liquid and use the Oldroyd-B constitutive equation. We reduce the governing equations into a set of one-dimensional equations by using an asymptotic analysis and then we examine steady state solutions for viscoelastic rotating liquid jets with surfactants. We thereafter examine small perturbations to this steady state to investigate both linear and non-linear instability of the liquid jet.