Study of a nanodroplet breakup through many-body dissipative particle dynamics

Breakup of a nanodroplet is a common phenomenon of great importance in the nanoprinting and the electrohydrodynamic jet printing, which affects the accuracy and efficiency of droplet delivery. When the diameter of a decaying jet reduces to nanometers, the breakup mechanism remains unclear because the traditional continuum theory fails. In this work, a mesoscale method, many-body dissipative particle dynamics, has been developed to investigate the breakup process of water, glycerol, and ethanol nanodroplets. Generally, a falling nanodroplet deforms and breaks up with the following stages, symmetrical deformation, thin-neck appearance, and drop-tip motion. The breakup time, the neck length, the minimum diameter of the neck before breakup, and the tip velocity of the formed tail after breakup have been examined. It is found that the neck length shows an exponential relationship with the time. Compared to the similarity solution near the separation point, the exponent relation between the minimum diameter of the neck and the reduced time has been verified. Moreover, the exponent (n) for different fluids can be roughly estimated by the Ohnesorge (Oh) number as n = 0.1015 log(Oh) + 0.6776. The tip velocity varies as the inverse square root of the reduced time when the tip shrinks slowly. When the tip shrinks rapidly, the exponential relationship between the tip velocity and the reduced time is predicted, which is also valid for shrinking a satellite droplet. This study provides a fundamental understanding of the nanodroplet breakup for improvement of their dynamical behaviors in a real application. Published under license by AlP Publishing.