https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1016/0169-5983(93)90106-K/pdf

Phenomena of liquid drop impact on solid and liquid surfaces

Sea salt aerosol (SSA) exerts a major influence over a broad reach of geophysics. It is important to the physics and chemistry of the marine atmosphere and to marine geochemistry and biogeochemistry generally. It affects visibility, remote sensing, atmospheric chemistry, and air quality. Sea salt aerosol particles interact with other atmospheric gaseous and aerosol constituents by acting as sinks for condensable gases and suppressing new particle formation, thus influencing the size distribution of these other aerosols and more broadly influencing the geochemical cycles of substances with which they interact. As the key aerosol constituent over much of Earth's surface at present, and all the more so in pre-industrial times, SSA is central to description of Earth's aerosol burden.

Sea Salt Aerosol Production: Mechanisms, Methods, Measurements, and Models - A Critical Review

There will be but few of my readers who have not, in some heavy shower of rain, beguiled the tedium of enforced waiting by watching, perhaps half-unconsciously, the thousand little crystal fountains that start from the surface of pool or river; noting now and then a surrounding coronet of lesser jets, or here and there a bubble that floats for a moment and then vanishes. It is to this apparently insignificant transaction, which always has been and always will be so familiar, and to others of a like nature, that I desire to call the attention of those who are interested in natural phenomena; hoping to share with them some of the delight that I have myself felt, in contemplating the exquisite forms that the camera has revealed, and in watching the progress of a multitude of events, compressed indeed within the limits of a few hundredths of a second, but none the less orderly and inevitable, and of which the sequence is in part easy to anticipate and understand, while in part it taxes the highest mathematical powers to elucidate.

The Impact of Drops on Liquid Surfaces and the Underwater Noise of Rain

A drop that falls into a deep liquid can either coalesce with the receiving liquid and form a vortex ring or splash. Which phenomenon actually occurs depends on the impact conditions. When the impact conditions are gradually changed the transition between coalescence and splashing proceeds via a number of intermediate steps. These are studied by means of high-speed photography of the normal impact of water drops on a plane water surface. The characteristics of different flows that appear in the transitional regime and possible mechanisms causing these flows are discussed in detail. The phenomena considered include the rise of thick jets and the ejection of high-rising thin jets out of the impact crater, the entrainment of gas bubbles, crater dynamics, crown formation and the generation of splash droplets. Finally, a classification of the phenomena characteristic of the transitional regime is given.

The transitional regime between coalescing and splashing drops

Various processes are described by which a drop of water, impacting on a water surface, may entrain a bubble. There are: (i) irregular entrainment, in which the complex details of a splash entrain bubbles; (ii) regular entrainment, in which the crater formed by the drop impact develops in a predictable way to form a single bubble; (iii) entrainment of large bubbles, in which most of the volume of the crater is trapped as a bubble; and (iv) Mesler entrainment, in which many very small bubbles are trapped in the very early stages of the impact process; possibly between wave crests of capillary waves which develop on the drop and on the water surface. This last process is different from the preceding three in that it produces very little sound. All of the processes except the third one have been described individually in the literature; here we present them together for comparison. The regular entrainment process is discussed in the greatest detail and some new experimental results are presented which concern the size and nature of the entrained bubbles. The significance of the regular and irregular entrainment processes to the generation of underwater sound by rain is discussed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022112090003378

The entrainment of bubbles by drop impacts

A study of the formation of vortex rings when a liquid drop falls into a stationary bath of the same liquid has been made. The investigation covered liquids with a wide range in surface tensions, densities and viscosities. The results confirm the reported existence of optimum dropping height from which the drop develops into a superior vortex ring. The optimum heights are analysed, by a photographic study, in terms of the liquid drop oscillation. It is found that vortex rings are formed best if the drop is spherical and changing from an oblate to a prolate spheroid at the moment of contact with the bath. A Reynolds number has been determined for vortex rings produced at optimum dropping heights; these numbers are approximately 1000. A possible mechanism for the ring formation is suggested.

P. R. Critchlow

Papers

Formation of vortex rings from falling drops