Whipping Instabilities in Electrified Liquid Jets

A liquid jet may develop different types of instabilities, like the so-called Rayleigh-Plateau instability, which breaks the jet into droplets. However, another type of instabilities may appear when we electrify a liquid jet and induce some charge at his surface. Among them, the most common is the so-called Whipping Instability, which is characterized by violent and fast lashes of the jet. In the submitted fluid dynamic video(see http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11422), we will show an unstable charged glycerine jet in a dielectric liquid bath, which permits an enhanced visualization of the instability. For this reason, it is probably the first time that these phenomena are visualized with enough clarity to analyze features as the effect of the feeding liquid flow rate through the jet or as the surprising spontaneous stabilization at some critical distance to the ground electrode.Comment: 3 pages, no figures, links to videos, Submission to the 26th Gallery of Fluid Motion (2009

Electrospinning of silica sub-microtubes mats with platinum nanoparticles for NO catalytic reduction

Silica sub-microtubes loaded with platinum nanoparticles have been prepared in flexible non-woven mats using co-axial electrospinning technique. A partially gelated sol made from tetraethyl orthosilicate was used as the silica precursor, and oil was used as the sacrificial template for the hollow channel generation. Platinum has been supported on the wall of the tubes just adding the metallic precursor to the sol–gel, thus obtaining the supported catalyst by one-pot method. The silica tubes have a high aspect ratio with external/internal diameters of 400/200 nm and well-dispersed platinum nanoparticles of around 2 nm. This catalyst showed a high NO conversion with very high selectivity to N2 at mild conditions in the presence of excess oxygen when using C3H6 as reducing agent. This relevant result reveals the potential of this technique to produce nanostructured catalysts onto easy to handle conformations.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under CTQ2012-36408 project