Short liquid bridges are stable under the action of surface tension. In applications like electronic packaging, food engineering, and additive manufacturing, this poses challenges to the clean and fast dispensing of viscoelastic fluids. Here, we investigate how viscoelastic liquid bridges can be destabilized by torsion. By combining high-speed imaging and numerical simulation, we show that concave surfaces of liquid bridges can localize shear, in turn localizing normal stresses and making the surface more concave. Such positive feedback creates an indent, which propagates toward the center and leads to breakup of the liquid bridge. The indent formation mechanism closely resembles edge fracture, an often undesired viscoelastic flow instability characterized by the sudden indentation of the fluid’s free surface when the fluid is subjected to shear. By applying torsion, even short, capillary stable liquid bridges can be broken in the order of 1 s. This may lead to the development of dispensing protocols that reduce substrate contamination by the satellite droplets and long capillary tails formed by capillary retraction, which is the current mainstream industrial method for destabilizing viscoelastic liquid bridges.

A finite element model is presented to describe the flow, resulting stresses and crystallization in a filament stretching extensional rheometer (FiSER). This model incorporates nonlinear viscoelasticity, nonisothermal processes due to heat release originating from crystallization and viscous dissipation as well as the effect of crystallization on the rheological behavior. To apply a uniaxial extension with constant extension rate, the FiSER plate speed is continuously adjusted via a radius-based controller. The onset of crystallization during filament stretching is investigated in detail. Even before crystallization starts, the rheology of the material can change due to the effects of flow-induced nucleation on the relaxation times. Both nucleation and structure formation are found to be strongly dependent on temperature, strain rate and sample aspect ratio. The latter dependence is caused by a clear distribution of crystallinity over the radius of the filament, which is a result of the nonhomogeneous flow history in the FiSER. Therefore, this numerical model opens the possibility to a priori determine sample geometries resulting in a homogeneous crystallinity or to account for the nonhomogeneity.

Filament stretching rheometry is a prominent experimental method to determine rheological properties in extensional flow whereby the separating plates determine the extension rate. In literature, several correction factors that can compensate for the errors introduced by the shear contribution near the plates have been introduced and validated in the linear viscoelastic regime. In this work, a systematic analysis is conducted to determine if a material-independent correction factor can be found for non-linear viscoelastic polymers. To this end, a finite element model is presented to describe the flow and resulting stresses in the filament stretching rheometer. The model incorporates non-linear viscoelasticity and a radius-based controller for the plate speed is added to mimic the typical extensional flow in filament stretching rheometry. The model is validated by comparing force simulations with analytical solutions. The effects of the end-plates on the extensional flow and resulting force measurements are investigated, and a modification of the shear correction factor is proposed for the non-linear viscoelastic flow regime. This shows good agreement with simulations performed at multiple initial aspect ratios and strain rates and is shown to be valid for a range of polymers with non-linear rheological behaviour.