Study on the breakup lengths of free round liquid jets

An experiment was conducted to measure the breakup lengths of water jets with a high-speed video camera for Weber numbers from 0 to about 1.1 × 103. The initial jet diameters are changed from 0.3mm to 1.0mm. The results indicate that at low jet velocity the breakup lengths of the jets are increased linearly from 0 to a maximum value. At the Weber number about 20 the breakup length of the jet reaches its maximum value for different initial jet diameter. A computation based on the dispersion equation is conducted to study the relationship between the growth rate of the jet surface wave and the maximum breakup length. The computations show that the maximum growth rate for the axisymmetric surface wave has a turning point at Weber number about 20, and that agrees well with the experiments.