An understanding of the dynamics of liquid jets is important in many applications such as in inkjet printing, for example.  Working with an international collaborator, we have been analytically and computationally investigating how externally applied temperature gradients can be used to better control (from the point-of-view of application to inkjet printers) both the printing speed and resolution.

We have developed advanced computational methods that are capable of following the jet dynamics over many different length and time scales; we are also considering the application of parallelisation to the computations in order to improve the time taken for the simulations to run.

The computations support additional analytical results, allowing us to understand, in particular, the approach to rupture of the jets (separation into droplets) and also how to control the initial instability of a uniform jet that  leads to rupture.