Surfactant-driven instability of a divergent flow

Abstract

Extremely small amounts of surface-active contaminants are known to drastically modify the hydrodynamic response of the water-air interface. Surfactant concentrations as low as a few thousand molecules per square micron are sufficient to eventually induce complete stiffening. In order to probe the shear response of a water-air interface, we design a radial flow experiment that consists in an upward water jet directed to the interface. We observe that the standard no-slip effect is often circumvented by an azimuthal instability with the occurence of a vortex pair. Supported by numerical simulations, we highlight that the instability occurs in the (inertia-less) Stokes regime and is driven by surfactant advection by the flow. The latter mechanism is suggested as a general feature in a wide variety of reported and yet unexplained observations.

References in corpus (4)

• Visco-elastic drag forces and crossover from no-slip to slip boundary conditions for flow near air-water interfaces
• Azimuthal instability of the radial thermocapillary flow around a hot bead trapped at the water-air interface
• Effect of surface-active contaminants on radial thermocapillary flows
• Hydrodynamic response of a surfactant-laden interface to a radial flow