ICTS

The stability of a pendant drop is discussed. The only scaled groups that govern the stability are the scaled volume and the Bond number. It can be shown without computations that the volume of the drop has a maximum value beyond which it must break catastrophically. However this upper bound on volume is not the instability limit for the drop for all Bond numbers. There exists a critical Bond number, above which the drop breaks before the upper bound on volume can be reached. We explain how we can find the instability “without” an instability calculation, i.e., without solving an eigenvalue problem.