Electric fields induce motion in many fluid systems, including polymer melts, surfactant micelles and colloidal suspensions. Likewise, electric fields can be used to move liquid drops. Electrically induced droplet motion manifests itself in processes as diverse as storm cloud formation, commercial ink-jet printing, petroleum and vegetable oil dehydration, electrospray ionization for use in mass spectrometry, electrowetting and lab-on-a-chip manipulations. An important issue in practical applications is the tendency for adjacent drops to coalesce, and oppositely charged drops have long been assumed to experience an attractive force that favours their coalescence. Here we report the existence of a critical field strength above which oppositely charged drops do not coalesce. We observe that appropriately positioned and oppositely charged drops migrate towards one another in an applied electric field; but whereas the drops coalesce as expected at low field strengths, they are repelled from one another after contact at higher field strengths. Qualitatively, the drops appear to 'bounce' off one another. We directly image the transient formation of a meniscus bridge between the bouncing drops, and propose that this temporary bridge is unstable with respect to capillary pressure when it forms in an electric field exceeding a critical strength. The observation of oppositely charged drops bouncing rather than coalescing in strong electric fields should affect our understanding of any process involving charged liquid drops, including de-emulsification, electrospray ionization and atmospheric conduction.

In an experiment on thin flat strips falling through a fluid in a vertical cell, two fundamental motions are observed: side-to-side oscillation (flutter) and end-over-end rotation (tumble). At high Reynolds number, the dimensionless similarity variable describing the dynamics is the Froude number Fr, being the ratio of characteristic times for downward motion and pendular oscillations. The transition from flutter to tumble occurs at Fr c 0.67 6 0.05. We propose a phenomenological model including inertial drag and lift which reproduces this motion, and directly yields the Froude similarity. [S0031-9007(98)06387-X]

Oppositely charged drops attract one another and, when the drops are sufficiently close, electrical stresses deform the leading edges of each drop into cones. We investigate whether or not the liquid cones coalesce immediately following contact. Using high-speed imaging, we find that the coalescence behavior depends on the cone angle, which we control by varying the drop size and the applied voltage across the drops. The two drops coalesce when the slopes of the cones are small, but recoil when the slopes exceed a critical value. We propose a surface energy model (volume-constrained area minimization) to describe the transition between these two responses. The model predicts a critical cone angle of 30.8 degrees , which is in good agreement with our measurements.

We present an experimental study of the fingering patterns in a Hele-Shaw cell, occurring when a gel-like material forms at the interface between aqueous solutions of a cationic surfactant (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide) and an organic salt (salicylic acid), two solutions known to form a highly elastic wormlike micellar fluid when mixed homogeneously. A variety of fingering instabilities are observed, depending on the velocity of the front (the injection rate), and on which fluid is injected into which. We have found a regime of non-confined stationary or wavy fingers for which width selection seems to occur without the presence of bounding walls, unlike the Saffman-Taylor experiment. Qualitatively, some of our observations share common mechanisms with instabilities of cooling lava flows or growing biofilms.

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