Abstract

From a mathematical model suggested by Vonnegut and Neubauer, relationships between droplet radius and charge to mass ratio are developed for electrohydrodynamically sprayed liquid particles. Under the assumption that an unstable liquid mass disrupts into equally sized and charged particles so that the system energy tends toward a minimum value, probability distributions of the charge-to-mass ratio and the droplet radius are derived as modified Maxwell—Boltzmann functions; such functions explain certain features of experimentally observed distributions. That charged droplet systems tend toward a minimum energy configuration is verfied by experimental evidence for Wood's metal, octoil, and glycerine.