This essay describes the current state of research into micrometre-scale liquid droplets in an ionised gas, usually referred to as a plasma. Such systems are a common occurrence in industrial processes, but have received little interest until recently. Electrostatic breakup is a significant mechanism for disrupting these droplets, but the effect of many plasma parameters on this mechanism has n...

In a simple two-component model of excitable tissue a spiral wave is found to break up into a large number of small spirals. More specifically, we used a modified FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Spiral breakup is found to occur when the recovery variable diffuses at a high rate. The breakup is caused by lateral instability of the wave front. We analyzed this instability using quasi-one-dimensional compu...

Charged water droplets generated by electrospray, sonic spray, and a vibrating orifice aerosol generator (VOAG) have been studied by digital macrophotography and image charge detection mass spectrometry. Image charge detection mass spectrometry provides information on the droplet size, charge, and velocity after transmission through a capillary interface. The digital images provide the droplet ...

The FENE-P model of a fluid is particularly suitable for describing the rheology of dilute polymer solutions (Newtonian solvents containing small amounts of dissolved polymer) as a result of its ability to capture nonlinear effects arising from the finite extensibility of the polymer chains. In extensional flows, these polymer solutions exhibit dramatically different behavior from the correspon...

Experiments on a periodically forced Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction show front breakup into a state of spatiotemporal disorder involving continual events of spiral-vortex nucleation and destruction. Using the amplitude equation for forced oscillatory systems and the normal form equations for a curved front line, we identify the mechanism of front breakup and explain the experimental obs...

The focus of this paper is on the numerical solution of the stochastic collection equation–stochastic breakup equation (SCE–SBE) describing the evolution of raindrop spectra in warm rain. The drop size distribution (DSD) is discretized using the fixed-pivot scheme proposed by Kumar and Ramkrishna, and new discrete equations for solving collision breakup are presented. The model is evaluated usi...

The breakup of viscous and viscoelastic drops in the high speed airstream behind a shock wave in a shock tube was photographed with a rotating drum camera giving one photograph every 5 ms. From these photographs we created movies of the fragmentation history of viscous drops of widely varying viscosity, and viscoelastic drops, at very high Weber and Reynolds numbers. Drops of the order of one m...

This paper discusses a new volumeand volume concentration–conserving, positive-definite, unconditionally stable iterative numerical scheme for solving temporary cloud/raindrop coalescence followed by breakup and the coupling of the scheme with an existing noniterative, volumeand volume concentration– conserving collision/coalescence (coagulation) scheme. The breakup scheme alone compares nearly...

An analytical formalism for the solution of cumulative beam breakup in linear accelerators with arbitrary beam current profile is developed. It is applied to obtain an expression for the transverse displacement of trains of finite bunches. The same formalism is used to investigate the beam breakup-enhanced displacement of beams caused by the misalignment of the deflecting structures or focusing...