Science
Stretching by outer eddies sets the turbulent breakup rate of drops and bubbles
Key Points
Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fragmentation of drops and bubbles in turbulence controls interfacial area generation, mixing, and transport in environmental and engineering flows. The nonlinear coupling between interfacial and hydrodynamic stresses has long prevented predictive modeling, a challenge we here overcome by decomposing the flow into outer and inner regions. We show that breakup is driven by isolated events of extreme interfacial stretching caused by the non-local action of the...
arXiv:2605.07504v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Fragmentation of drops and bubbles in turbulence controls interfacial area generation, mixing, and transport in environmental and engineering flows. The nonlinear coupling between interfacial and hydrodynamic stresses has long prevented predictive modeling, a challenge we here overcome by decomposing the flow into outer and inner regions. We show that breakup is driven by isolated events of extreme interfacial stretching caused by the non-local action of the outer field. For breakup to occur, extreme events must inject energy faster than the interface can dissipate it through the formation of inner eddies. Leveraging the separation between inner and outer processes, we derive an analytical model that quantitatively predicts breakup statistics. Our results establish a direct, causal link between turbulent intermittency and the memoryless nature of breakup, providing a first-principles framework for turbulent fragmentation that can be generalized to complex fluids.