Electrically driven instability in elastic liquids

Abstract

WE report here a striking phenomenon which we have observed in some elastic liquids. The phenomenon was discovered during the cleaning out of a glass vessel which contained a newly prepared solution of a polyisobutene of high molecular mass in a polyisobutene with a low molecular mass. The liquid was rather viscous, and so a good proportion of it remained on the walls of the container. We decided to recover this by utilising the elastic properties of the solution and ‘winding’ it onto a glass rod. Using this method the liquid can be torn completely free from the walls of the container. Having thus removed some of the liquid from the container we found that the liquid on the rod spontaneously developed a number of fine streamers (Fig. 1). These emanated from irregularities on the surface of the liquid and their tips moved away from the rod at speeds of several cm s⁻¹.