Rayleigh–Plateau Jet Dispersion

The Rayleigh–Plateau instability explains why a falling stream of fluid breaks up into smaller droplets. This model finds the capillary wavelengths that grow on an ideal inviscid incompressible liquid cylinder of radius R with negligible outside-fluid inertia. We analyze axisymmetric surface perturbations.

Experiment

You can interact with the dispersion properties of the capillary jet in the module. Follow these steps:

1. Open the Rayleigh–Plateau Jet Dispersion module.
2. Set the Reduced wavenumber control to 0.75.
3. Set the Radius control to 1.
4. Observe that the Bessel ratio increases, changing the growth exponent and lowering the wavelength.