Convective and absolute instability of viscoelastic liquid jets in the presence of gravity

Abstract

The convective and absolute instability of a viscoelastic liquid jet falling under gravity is examined for axisymmetrical disturbances. We use the upper-convected Maxwell model to provide a mathematical description of the dynamics of a viscoelastic liquid jet. An asymptotic approach, based on the slenderness of the jet, is used to obtain the steady state solutions. By considering traveling wave modes, we derive a dispersion relation relating the frequency to the wavenumber of disturbances which is then solved numerically using the Newton-Raphson method. We show the effect of changing a number of dimensionless parameters, including the Froude number, on convective and absolute instability. In this work, we use a mapping technique developed by Kupfer, Bers, and Ram [“The cusp map in the complex-frequency plane for absolute instabilities,” Phys. Fluids 30, 3075–3082 (1987)] to find the cusp point in the complex frequency plane and its corresponding saddle point (the pinch point) in the complex wavenumber plane for absolute instability. The convective/absolute instability boundary is identified for various parameter regimes.