Steady capillary jet length

Despite their fundamental and applied importance, a general model to predict the nearly deterministic natural breakup length of steady capillary jets has not been proposed yet. Here we describe and quantify the energy route that sets this length for a given set of liquid properties, geometry and operating conditions. We find that the underlying mechanism that determines the jet length is the short-term transient growth rate of perturbations excited by the jet breakup itself. We propose a perturbation analysis of the time averaged energy conservation equation of the system in the absence of body forces (applicable to flow focused and ballistic capillary jets). The balance of total energy rates due to the perturbations is reduced, by dimensional analysis, to a closed algebraic expression with two universal constants. These constants are calculated by optimal fitting of a large set of experimental measurements of jet breakup lengths, including previously published data from different sources. Available experimental and numerical data conform remarkably well to the universal scaling law found.