The water entry of multi-droplet streams and jets

Abstract

Water entry has been studied for over a century, but few studies have focused on multiple droplets impacting on a liquid bath sequentially. We connect multi-droplet streams, jets and solid objects with physical-based scaling arguments that emphasize the intrinsically similar cavities. In particular, the cavities created by the initial impact of both droplet streams and jets on an initially quiescent liquid pool exhibit the same types of cavity seal as hydrophobic spheres at low Bond number, some of which were previously unseen for jets and droplet streams. Low-frequency droplet streams exhibit an additional three new cavity seal types unseen for jets or solid spheres that can be predicted with a new non-dimensional frequency. The cavity depth and cavity velocity for both droplet and jet impact are rationalized by an energy scaling analysis and the Bernoulli equation.